First off, fire inspector came and approve out home! That was our last bit that we had to do for our home study so hoping our social worker has her stuff done so we can submit shortly!
I have received a few questions from several different people wondering what the heck we are or aren't doing when it comes to fostering. Some have asked if we have a specific child in mind to adopt? Three people asked specifically why we aren't stepping up to adopt Juri whom we just signed up to be prayer warriors for. On top of that I know several people have asked if we will be adopting a child from the orphanage in Honduras since we love it there so much and what about the boy we have sponsored? Also I was asked if we have run out of infertility options and this is all we have left to go to? So while I thought I was clear with what our intentions are (at least for today that is) I thought I would clarify these and several other things as perhaps my words haven't been straight forward or some of you are new readers and haven't read through my other posts! First off before I say anything, I'm going to be totally upfront and honest and say this is where we are at as of today this very day. What tomorrow brings or in 6 months time or a year from now could be completely totally different. Our intentions and motivations may change so I want to say firstly I will never say never for who knows what the future and God's will may bring but for now I will just answer the questions above from today's perspective!
To start I have been very candid about our infertility shenanigans. In a way this has become a journal for myself and helps document everything. While I never intended on being so honest it hit me that there truly is no real reason to stay hush hush about everything. It was something we (mostly I) suffered with quietly without many people knowing about it, however I decided to step out and not be afraid to share our journey with others as I figured more prayers and good wishes never hurt! As for where we are with the whole infertility thing, no we have not hit a dead-end or anything of the sort. We have not run out of options and in a few weeks we have an appointment with the Reproductive Endocrinologist to go over what the next steps will be. Every few months we meet up to discuss where we are at so this is routine. At this time we still intend on moving forward with the infertility stuff though right now we aren't 100% what route that will entail until after our appointment. I know I have said it before, us becoming foster/adoptive parents actually has nothing to do with our infertility stuff. Many close friends and family knows we intending on becoming foster parents after our first anniversary as you have to be married for a whole year before you can start classes which is what we waited for then jumped into it. Due to Brian being out of town on an extended assignment in Chicago during the week right after our anniversary we were not able to be in the first groupings of classes after our first anniversary and they took off the fall into winter classes due to all the holidays so we then had to wait for the next round of classes that started in January. Am I happy with the timing? Of course as it is something that is going in a positive direction as the infertility stuff has been rather stale. If we become pregnant do we still plan to foster? Yup we sure do! As long as we can handle everything we will do so however if we become overwhelmed or want to put our home on hold and not take any placements for a while we are able to do that at any time for as long as we would like. It only would take a call to take us off the list. The great thing about fostering is we have control when it comes to being open or closed and what placements we take etc. We are not pressured to take a placement if we are too busy or do not think it would be a fit and we can temporary tell them not to call until yada yada yada time be it a month, six months, or even a year or so on.
Now we DO NOT have a specific child in mind. We are going into this with intentions on fostering. Fostering is temporary, adoption after court is permanent. Yes we got duel certified as adoptive parents too because for the home study it is easier to be duel certified then if we end up wanting to take an adoptive placement or wish to adopt a child or children whom we are fostering we would need to start the home study process all over again and resubmit everything to the state to approve. So in a way we are killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Everyone in our pre-service classes were told to become duel certified to save time and hassle even if you have no intentions of adopting as your heart may change. In our case I am sure at some point we will likely adopt a child but for right now that is not our goal right now. Our goal is to be foster parents and take in children who need a temporary home while their parents work their case plan so they can be reunited. Reunification is the main goal of foster care. We were told in our county about 3 out of every 4 children return to their birth parents and the other 1 out of 4 tend to go into relative care placements first and then if not placed there usually the foster parents adopt them. If the foster parents do not wish to adopt them for whatever reason they are then made available for others to submit their home study for. For a young child a social worker can received hundreds of home studies from throughout the U.S. for a certain child who is available. The social worker and her staff then have a staffing meeting and go through each of the home studies until they pick a handful out and then narrow it down from those few chosen and decide which family would be the best fit for that child. It is a long complex and honestly aggravating system as we have heard people that go into fostering with intentions of adopting and only after 10 placements and having to let go of 9 children they wanted to adopt do they finally adopt a child that comes into their home 2 or 3 years later from when they started everything. Now you can be approved as an adopting only home and only take in children that are legally at risk to coming into permanent custody (meaning they or a sibling has come into care in the past and it is almost 100% certain the judge will revoke rights) but even then relatives can still step up out of nowhere so nothing is ever straight forward until the adoption is officially granted in court. Again though if you are an at-risk or adoptive only placement chances are most children who do come into care will be adopted by their foster parents and most children that come in and are made available down the road it was unknown their cases would turn out to be an adoptive placement to begin with so your best luck if you want to adopt is to be a foster parent and wait for a placement to become available though it could take several placements and possibly even never happen. The agency makes it known upfront that fostering and even foster-to-adopt the goal is always reunification unless a judge deems it necessary for the parental rights to be revoked then relative, then foster parent, then open to anyone with a home study is what the pecking order is. If we wanted to strictly adopt I do not think this would be the way we would go because of all the uncertainty however for us going in with the mindset that this is temporary if something does become permanent it would only be an extra blessing!
So why are we not adopting Juri? As I stated above we do not intend on proceeding with adopting right now especially an international adoption. For those who are not aware, adopting domestically here in the U.S. through an agency who works with placing babies directly from birth mothers to your care is anywhere between $20-$50,000 for one baby. Yup that's a lot to swallow! Even through Catholic charities though they state they have a sliding fee based on your income, I looked out of curiosity and they are on par with their fee schedule as any other private agency. It is a money making business period, sad but true. Now for Juri he is in Eastern Europe and his adoption would cost about $20-$25,000, most of which that amount is for the traveling a family would need to do of two trips so plane tickets there and back twice for the parents and then a one-way ticket for him, lodging in country, food, transportation to his specific region from the capital and to and from the orphanage each day and so on. The actually adoption proceedings and facilitator fees are much less but with travel it jacks up the price. So with those numbers in mind that alone is one reason we aren't proceeding with adopting internationally or domestically through a private agency. Will we ever? Perhaps, but definitely not right now. We would want at least some money saved and likely we would need to do countless fundraisers to raise enough money to pay for a child's "ransom" to bring them home. Would we adopt Juri in that case? Never say never but that is something we haven't even talked about we really haven't gone there. We chose him to pray for him and raise awareness and that's it. We know if we decided to make that leap of faith and adopt from Eastern Europe God would show us who He meant to be ours and I'll just leave it at that. Right now we don't feel the pushing urge to proceed in that direction and we know financially while we are more than able to raise a child, that upfront chunk of change is too much to swallow right now. To be honest we don't know if we would even be able to get enough outside support with grants and donations from our family and friends community to cover the hefty cost. If we won the lottery and the money was there we would reconsider adopting a child or children, but right now we feel fostering is the right direction for us and if that brings an adoptive situation (adopting through foster care is little to no cost) then fine we could handle that if we choose to.
Why aren't we adopting from the orphanage in Honduras? To put it bluntly, we can't. The orphanage is a private Catholic orphanage. Children available for international adoption from Honduras only live in the government orphanages. The orphanage in Honduras we go to has custody of the children, they are not in government care. On top of that, like Eastern Europe, it has similar costs and a much more lengthy adopting process. Eastern Europe right now is flying 6-9 months from start to finish to adopt which is super fast compared to most international countries! For Honduras, waiting for a referral of a child to adopt from a government orphanage to bringing them home takes about 2-3 years so it's a LONG process and one we likely would not even apply for even if we wanted to adopt internationally. How about the boy we sponsor? First off again he was never available to even be adopted plus he is now 19 and too old to be adopted (once you turn 16 you can't be adopted into the US from another country due to immigration laws) and further more there are laws that you need to be so and so much older than your adopted child and we are just way too close in age it would never fly.
So there is what we aren't and what we are doing. We are fostering and have a pretty open age group of birth-8 years old, up to two children (siblings or two unrelated placements at once), open to either gender, and are open to all ethnicity's except for black children. Reason being except black (not going to say African American as very few are even African decent) is our community has very few to no black individuals. All of our friends that are black are not local so talk about standing out. I watch the kids get off the bus right next to us at the elementary school (which is the school a school age child if placed with us would go) and not a single black child gets off a bus out of the hundreds of kids. Trust me, I've looked! I think being a foster child is enough to make one stick out, but then to be outside of their known community and to stick out even more would just not be fair to a child. Plus how would I even do a little black girls hair?!?! I remember at the salon I get my haircut at a black woman was complaining that none of the woman there even know how to do black hair...that would be an issue! I still wonder how I would do any girls hair, but make it black hair and I'd be done for. So for us right now we feel this is our only real exception and our social worker completely agreed and said she questioned based on our community if it would even be a good idea. She also made it clear we don't need any reasons ever to explain ourselves and whatever we are open to is what we are open to, no one is raising eyebrows and it is only our choice. She said if we want to take in only purple children then that is perfectly fine....but we would likely be waiting for some time :)
I hope this was enough clarification to those that poised questions. I love getting questions as they tend to explode into blog posts! If any of my readers have any questions never hesitate to shoot me a text or message or even call. I love when others message me with their input and thoughts on my different posts and my posts have been known to be brought up during lunch with my girlfriends and lead to great discussions. Who knew when I started blogging that I would have the outpouring of support and readers that I do!
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