Other People's Kids

Introduction

I'm a long-time blogger. My usual milieu is politics, and those are the blogs I read most...but I've been aware for years that there's a whole other blogging world out there. Time to jump in...but what to write about that fires my passion like politics?

Well, my life is in flux right now. My wife and I got married a year ago last May, and this summer we moved to a central Minnesota town from the Twin Cities...quite a change. And now we're about to embark on what is likely to be the greatest adventure of our lives.

I grew up on a foster home...but I was not a foster child. My parents decided to become foster parents when I was about 7, and just quit 2 or 3 years ago. In that stretch of nearly 30 years, they fostered perhaps 125 kids...some for only a day or two, some for years, and one is now my beloved adopted sister. I only had one biological sister, but I had more siblings growing up than you did. Neener.

My wife is a licensed social worker and strong Christian...a combination you won't often find, I don't think. She aches to help people, and had considered becoming a foster parent when she was single. That's a prospect that would frighten the most hardened of the foster veterans I know, but I think she is the quality of woman that might just have pulled it off. I married her because she has qualities like that.

Together, we make quite a team. And now that we've gotten somewhat settled in our new lives, we're proceeding through the process of foster licensure.

We applied with the county this summer, dropping off two nights worth of paperwork (including several mind-numbing hours reading the fire code and foster rules to make sure there were no show-stoppers in our situation) personally at the county social services office. After several weeks of no response, we happened to talk to a couple at church who are foster parents working through PATH. They gave us a phone number and we were on the road.

A couple of weeks later, after our first meeting with a real live PATH social worker, we got a call from the county wanting money to pay for a background check in my wife's old county. Sheesh. The least they could have done was notify us that our application materials were being used for something other than dust catchers. "No thank you, we've decided to go with PATH."

Anyway, we meet with the social worker, Vicki (Name changed to protect the innocent...more on her later as we get to know her), for the third of what we understand to be four meetings that are required to get our provisional license. I've almost got the house up to snuff. I have to finish putting spindles on a couple of outside stairway railings (a ball of 6-inch diameter can't fit between them) and I have to get the fire alarms rewired, plus a couple of other quick items and we're good to go.

Pray for us. We're about to enter the valley of the shadow of death. Worse...we're about to invite other people's kids into our home for a long visit. I'll try to keep you relatively informed on events here. It's probably gonna get interesting. It'll probably be the time of our lives.

posted by Dan @ 8:29 PM