What a week!

Well, this has been a rather busy week. I am just glad to be on the other side of this one. I don't know that we could have taken much more stress!

To start off the week, I had to wake up extra early for a meeting at work - I had to be there at 6:30 am. Those of you who know me well know that is a valid item to list in the "stress" section because I HATE waking up early. I am definitely not a morning person. The worst part, the meeting had to be cancelled AFTER we got there because no one showed up. UGH! Then I loaded up all FOUR of our animals (3 dogs and 1 cat) to go to the vet for vaccinations. Yup, by myself....and the four animals....at the vets office for two hours...one dog fight between the males and $830 later, we were back in the car on the way home.

Monday night Patrick had his second sleep study. This one was to fit him with a CPAP machine as he was diagnosed with SEVER sleep apnea at this first sleep study (I have been telling him for years!). So needless to say, he didn't get any sleep Monday night - which always makes me wonder how they can really study your sleep patterns if you can't ever get comfortable enough to sleep during a sleep study - but that's another post all together! :)

Tuesday was our oldest foster child's dental appointment. This is significant because he had to have four crowns put in, some fillings and some cleanig and sealing. This means they had to actually completely sedate him in order to get the work done - since he's two, there was NO way he was going to sit still long enough to get that all done otherwise. So we had to be at the hospital by 6:00 am - Yup, another early morning. Patrick was still at his sleep study, so that meant I got the honor of taking care of that appointment. We got to the hospital and started to get him ready to go back to the OR and the nurse told me that we can't proceed until I can get their case worker on the phone to get an approval from her to proceed. Now, I am medical consenter, so why the case worker had to give consent, I don't know. But after about an hour or so of calling around - because you know no one was in that office at 6:00 in the morning - I was able to hunt down the boys' case worker's cell phone number. She was WAY excited to get a call from me so early, but the nurse took the verbal. But we had to wait until 9:00 before they started prepping him to go back to the OR (they don't even put him in a gown, just some meds to make him sleepy and then carry him back) because they had to bump us from our original time to wait for the case worker's approval. About 10:00 they were done and about 11:00 we were on our way home. He was pretty upset most of the ride home from waking up from the anesthesia and getting the IV in his foot, but by the afternoon, he was back to normal. He does have four silver teeth right in front though....medicaid won't pay for the white crowns....so I told him he needed to just call it his "grill" and be proud. (on a side note, when we picked him up from day care the next day the teachers told us he was showing off those teeth left and right! :) ). Meanwhile, Patrick has come home from his sleep study and was catching up on his sleep as best as he could.

Between keeping an eye on the oldest one (Thank you Grandmother and Poppa and Aunt Megan for taking care of the youngest one for us) and cleaning, we were pretty busy the rest of that day. Why were we cleaning???? Oh, that would be because we had TWO visits from TWO different departments at CPS for inspections. One was Wednesday night - our quarterly assessment done by our case worker - except she is on maternity leave, so a sub came in to do our quarterly assessment - and the next night we were expecting someone from Licensing to come and do an inspection of our home because we were picked at random to be inspected. We are SO lucky!

So Wednesday night, the sub case worker came over - 40 minutes late - and gave us a quick walk through. Aside from not having a fire escape plan posted (first time we heard about that one!) and our cat box having a "slight odor" (it's a cat box!) we didn't have any major issues. This was the night that was kind of the test run for the next night - the one that really counted!

Thursday night, the rep from Licensing came over and started her inspection. It was interesting the things she was looking at - she asked the oldest to show her his clothes, made sure there was a waterproof mattress pad on the bed and asked about whether he wears pull-ups or regular diapers (he wears both if you were curious yourself.). Then she went to the youngest's room and made sure he had clothes and diapers as well. The she went to the bathroom in the hall and ran the water to make sure we had hot water and then checked to make sure we had toilet paper and soap. She checked the kitchen next to make sure we had food for them and then the fridge to make sure the food we had in there was properly stored. Lastly, she sat down at our dining room table and asked us (me because Patrick was chasing after the kids) a bunch of questions and we showed her our documentation of trainings, car insurance, pet vaccinations, fire inspection, etc. Oh, don't forget the fire exit plan - that I drew up on the computer - it looks awesome! I forgot to print it before she got there so I was having to print it up while she was there. If I hadn't gotten it printed up and posted before she left, it would be a "concern" or violation. But I was able to get it posted before she left and we passed the inspection with NO CONCERNS! (don't worry, she didn't even mention the cat box!)

Now here we are at Friday and we are thankful for a quiet evening at home playing games with family - no more inspections or visitors for now - though I am sure someone will be calling next week! It just wouldn't be the same without some stranger walking around our house! :)

Patience, Grasshopper, Patience

That is my MANTRA these days. Though I am not nearly as "crazy" with anxiety as I was when we were waiting to find out if our licenses were approved to foster/adopt, this waiting to find out the fate of these precious children is getting harder and harder. I think that has a lot to do with how in love we all are - not just Patrick and I, but the entire family and our friends too! I find it hard to remind myself that the odds are more likely they will go home to family than they are that they will stay with us. So I try to remind myself to have patience and keep my faith that God has a plan for these boys (and for Patrick and I) and we have to trust He really does know best!

The boys' case worker came by for a home visit last night. I wish I could tell you all that we have some specific tidbits of news to share from that visit, but we simply don't. The most we could get was that it appears there is an Aunt that might be willing to take both boys. Praise God! My only prayer has been that these boys get to stay together. It would be so traumatic on these boys to be split up, so we are very thankful to know there is a slight chance they could be together afterall. We don't know when that might happen. Their case worker told us last night "there's just no way to tell, the people who do the home studies are so slow so it could be two months or it could be four. I just don't have any other information." So we are having to remind ourselves to be content with taking it one day at a time. Thankfully, we have other resources for information that have been more willing to share what they know with us. That at least gives us some peace of mind about where things are going. If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said the possibility was strong that we would get to keep the older one (that's what my gut said). But now my gut is saying "be prepared, these boys are both going to leave soon." It could also be that I have indegestion, but I would put money on what my gut says most times! :)

So while we don't have anything concrete to even think about right now - not even a possible idea of how long we might have these guys for - we just keep moving one day at a time, praying for what God sees as best for our tentative family and faithfully following that path.

On another side note, we had a WONDERFUL birthday party for the youngest little one - he just turned 1 year old! We braved the outside for about 45 minutes and decided the cold and wind was just not worth it - the hamburgers weren't cooking because the wind was so bad! So thanks to the Pringles for allowing us to crash their house and bring the party indoors! We had an absolutely wonderful time and both boys slept nice and soundly all night long and long into the morning - they were so pleasantly worn out from the fun! Again we remain in awe of the wonderful support we have. For so many people to be so willing to open their hearts to these little guys without the promise of any kind of permanence is inspiring. We appreciate you all more than we could ever say! God Bless!