We had another foster care placement this past weekend, this time with one seven-year-old boy. Here’s what I learned:

I don’t understand ADHD. This little boy has been diagnosed with ADHD which, at least this past weekend, meant that he wanted to try every game/toy in our house for about a minute before moving on to the next game/toy. This was most frustrating to me after we’d spent about 5 minutes setting up a game of Battleship only for him to quit the game after we’d each had only two turns. I do not understand this. I finish books I don’t like. I finish bad movies. I play a game until there’s a winner. It hurts me a little inside to walk away from an unfinished game.
There are ways to conquer ADHD, at least for a while. On Saturday afternoon, after … Read More »

It’s been a couple of weeks since our first (and so far, only) foster care placement so I thought I’d share some more feelings/observations now that I’m a little removed from that weekend.

Observation #1: Foster care is a lot like you expect it to be. It’s hard, it’s tiring (so tiring), it’s worthwhile. This blogger has recently written about what it’s like when kids leave your home, and she’s right. You (or at least I)  go through a mourning period. It almost felt disrespectful to put the house back together too soon after they’d left, and I just recently put all of the toys back and got the room completely ready again. I think since this was our first time I took their leaving especially hard, and I think next time it won’t be so bad. Of course, I know there … Read More »

My dad asked if I would blog about our first foster care placement, and I said I didn’t know if I would because I didn’t know what to say. Todd said I should blog about it just to tell people we successfully did it. So, people, we successfully did it. We fostered two kids this past weekend, and all four of us lived to tell about it. (I would say all six of us, to include the cats, but they’re a little shell shocked so it may be premature to say they made it through.)

We knew fostering would be tough and sad, but I don’t think anyone knows how tough or sad it is until they actually do it. It’s kind of like “Steel Magnolias.” You know intellectually that it’s a sad movie, but you don’t realize just how sad … Read More »

Todd and I became licensed foster parents today. He stayed home this morning to meet with the person from the KDHE, and when he called me after she’d left our house I expected him to say we hadn’t passed the inspection and we had more work to do. But he didn’t say that, he said that we passed. And that she thought our kids’ room is cute (which it totally is).

I would’ve been pretty upset if we hadn’t passed since we have now closely followed two separate checklists of things to do to our home for it to be considered fit for foster children. But I was also surprised we passed, and had this feeling of “Well, we sure tricked them.”

That feeling of trickery doesn’t come from a place of actual deceit.  We made all the necessary changes to our … Read More »

I don’t really have anything I feel like writing about, but I figured it was time to get the “Merry Christmas” post off the top of my page. So here’s some things you might (but probably won’t) find interesting.

I have some items for sale at The Onion Tree, located at Doulgas & Hillside in Wichita. The shop is closing on January 15 and after that I’ll sell the un-sold items through my Etsy shop. But you need to get over there like, today, to look at all the cute things from the other artists.
Our final foster care home inspection is happening on Monday, January 9. We’ve yet to complete the list of things to do that we received at our last Youthville meeting, but we did successfully* install magnetic cabinet locks the other night. We feel pretty good about that.
Wow, … Read More »

The other day I made a sarcastic comment about our communication with Youthville. I was pretty frustrated when I wrote that post, but as Todd and my mom quickly pointed out, I probably shouldn’t have written what I did. So I would like to apologize to Youthville for airing my grievances with it in an unhelpful way on my blog.

I would also like to say that there are a lot of good people who work at Youthville who do some very tough jobs very well. They do important work that most of us don’t want to do, and they should be shown more appreciation.

I think my frustrations come from the fact that Youthville is a very large organization that is underfunded and understaffed, and as good as its employees are, due to its size and budget some things happen that … Read More »

Hi! Remember me? At one time I blogged regularly. I don’t do that so much anymore, so you should just stop expecting it and I’ll stop apologizing when I don’ t do it. Deal? Deal.

So what has kept me busy lo these many weeks? Well, first up is getting our house ready to be licensed for foster children. Has this been the longest licensing process in Kansas state history? Yes, yes it has. Thanks for asking. But a few weeks ago we got on the Youthville licensing person’s calendar for November 29 (or so we thought – foreshadowing!) and really got to work.

A couple weekends ago our friends’ brother-in-law installed what we feel are rather unnecessary railings on the front of our house. He also fixed the loose/already-fallen-off bricks on our front steps, and came in under budget. He’s our … Read More »

Things I Learned About Foster Parenting While Watching My Friends’ Kids.

Dora the Explorer is awful. She teaches children nothing, not even Spanish. As far as my future foster kids know, Dora doesn’t come in on our TV. Weird, right?
Blue’s Clues is awful. And soul crushing. I happened to watch the episodes that transitioned from Steve to his brother Joe. I hadn’t realized how dead behind the eyes Steve was until Joe took over for him. Poor Steve. As far as my future foster kids know, Blue’s Clues doesn’t come in on our TV.
Free Willy is about 109 minutes too long. I somehow made it to this ripe old age of mine without having seen Free Willy. One of the little girls I watched must have known this fact and thought it her responsibility to rectify the situation, because I watched … Read More »

So maybe it’s time to tell you, the twelve people who read my blog and are therefor my twelve favorite people in the whole world, about what’s been going on in our lives lately. You may remember that we’ve been planning to adopt internationally, most recently from Rwanda. I don’t really want to go into all the reasons we were planning on adopting from Rwanda, because the choice on where to adopt from is personal and sometimes people can get very mean when they disagree with your choice. And I want this blog and its comment section to be places of love, not places I’m afraid to go for fear of increasing my sense of guilt (like my inbox).

Anyway, a few months ago Rwanda suspended its international adoptions. We had already pretty much eliminated most other international programs from our … Read More »