Today was our home study and it wasn’t anything I expected! What I envisioned in my head was some lady wearing a business skirt and heels with a clip board walking around my house, opening drawers, taking notes over the contents of my fridge and asking my kids if we beat them. Not even kidding, lol.

What really happened was our case worker (CW) came in our home, with Josie dancing around her singing a song about how she was the lady who was going to bring us a new brother and sister. She was warm and smiley with sparkly blue eyes and made me feel relaxed instantly. She just wanted to see the kids’ rooms, potential foster kids’ room(s), our room, play room, etc. We chatted about if our finished basement room with a recessed window would meet safety standards since we plan to have that room available if the kids don’t want to share with our kids off the bat. We want them to decide to room/be siblings, not just force them to start sharing rooms with strangers.

Then we hung out at our kitchen table and our CW just wanted to hear about our lives, what made us want to foster, why we were interested in older kids, do we have a support system, that sort of thing…and we ended up chatting for over an hour!

I shared how I had Brynn at an early age, and how much her biological family means to her, and therefore to us. How she’s biracial, which gives us that much more understanding of potentially raising diversified kids, whether white kids from a different walk of life than ours, or children of a different race. Nick talked about his parents taking in a 14 year old when he was in grade school and being exposed to a hurting teenager at a young age and seeing their patience and sacrifices to give him a better life.

Looking at our lives leading up to that moment, it’s hard not to see God’s hand at work in our lives…shaping our minds even as children, getting us ready to parent an older child someday. Then our CW confided that when she pulled up to our nice home, saw our “picture perfect” family she wasn’t sure how we were going to handle fostering/adopting an older hurting child from a completely different world than the one we seem to live in, but after hearing our stories, she was already thinking of how much our future child(ren) could thrive in our accepting family! I mean, wow, right?

I never dreamed that when I going through struggles as a young single mom, that it would help me be empathetic some day to my future son’s biological mother. There are a host of other hard issues we went through visitation wise with Brynn when she was babyAll things work together, don’t they?

After chatting a bit, and losing track of the time, we got a list of what we need to complete our certification:

– fire extinguisher

-birth certificates/marriage certificate copies

– first aid/CPR class certification (taking it Monday)

….and that’s. it.

She said that we should be done in 3-4 weeks. WEEKS people! This dream we’ve talked about since I was pregnant with Nicholas is actually happening. She’s told us that the need is great, and there are kids needing their forever homes *now*. All we can do now is get our ends tied up and pray pray pray.

We are asking any friends and family to PLEASE refrain from any negativity. Any concerns over our current children, concerns over if we have time for this, concerns as to if we can handle this, etc. These are little lives that deserve just as much love and a shot as life as our kids. We won’t put our kids’ safety at risk, but we are well aware that this isn’t going to be easy for anyone. Not easy for us, our children or our future children.

But if we don’t do it…who will?