Decisions Decisions

Well, not much has happened in the last few days - given it was the weekend and all! But Patrick and I started talking about our vacancy list profile and decided it was a little silly that we were willing to ADOPT a 2 year old, but not FOSTER a two year old. If we are comfortable enough with the idea of adopting a little girl that age, then we might as well be comfortable enough to foster them at that age! So we contacted our case worker and asked her to change our profile on the vacancy list to include girls 0 -2 instead of girls 0-1. We talked about including boys in that mix as well (again if we are willing to adopt a boy, why wouldn't we be willing to foster a boy?) but we both really wanted our first child to be a girl, so we are sticking with just girls (for now!).

In the mean time, our case worker was diligently gathering additional "intel" on these two children we are being considered for now. She shared with us this afternoon, that she has not heard anything negative from the case workers making the decision about who these children will go to so we should be "all good". I am going to take that to mean we are still in the "running" for these two. She also told us that there may be a chance that the judge will grant a 6 month extension for the parents of these two children to "get their act together". I can't promise I will get this right, but my best guess is the parents have been given at least one (and maybe more) chances during the course of time these children have been in foster care. I assume they did not make the necessary efforts if CPS was moving to terminate parental rights come January. It seems that now, the idea of losing their children forever for real this time has caused them to make a renewed effort. There is a chance that the judge will allow an additional 6 months for the parents to make that turn around before making the final ruling about the parental rights. My thoughts are these: 1. 6 months is not very long to get your entire life turned around, but if they are willing to really make the effort then they can certainly make a good start. 2. If they are willing to really put in the work to turn their lives around in 6 months, then they must really care for these children and have just made some bad mistakes. 3. If it is safe and they can take good care of them, it is always best to return the children to their parents. I would personally like some strict guarantees, but I know that won't happen. But I believe that God will make the right thing happen for these children, the parents and Patrick and I. So if the parents are able to turn things around and the judge decides to award them custody, I have to believe God has a reason for it. All of this to say, our case worker wanted to make sure we would still be willing to take these children given the fact that they may have this additional 6 month extension - which makes it a much larger legal risk kind of placement than it was at first. Of course we said YES! If we only get to have them for 6 months and that means they get to go back to loving parents, then great. If that is not the way things work out, then we will be thrilled to have the chance to adopt them!

So as you can see it is either feast or famine in the world of fostering! We are either waiting for days on end or bombarded with new questions every second. So we are getting used to the change in tide the more we get used to working with CPS. As I have said before, at least we are not bored! :) As we hear more, we will certainly keep you all posted!