Adoption Options – Our Journey Through Foster Care Part 2

Last week I explained how we decided to become foster parents, as well as the questions that we had before we started. This week I will explain the process.

After calling the agency we hoped to be working for, we received a package in the mail telling us what the steps were.

• We had to fill out a foster home application 
• We had to attend classes on what being a foster parent involved.
• Everyone in the family had to have health checks.
• My husband and I had to have a criminal history record clearance.
• As we lived in base housing we had to sign an authorization to release confidential information.

Part of filling out the application meant that we had to ask three non-family members to write an honest letter on how they felt about us becoming foster parents. My husband and I also had to write autobiographies; about our lives growing up, how we felt about our parents and their parenting skills, about the mistakes we had made in our lives and if we felt we had learned from them.

My husband was very nervous about the background check. He had been in jail for a day and he thought this might disqualify us. Obviously it didn’t! I on the other hand wondered if our friends felt we would make good parents. As always, the waiting is the hardest part!

We have some funny memories from this time period. Every family member had to be tested for TB. Our youngest daughter felt it her duty to protect her older sister from the test. You can read that story here. (Scroll down to the 9^th paragraph if you don’t want to read the entire loving tribute to my Girl 2!)

The best part of all of this was the classes. Up to this point we still didn’t know if we would be chosen to be foster parents to medically fragile infants or not. We learned quite a bit in those classes! I’ll share that with you next week.