In our house we believe in miracles, for all the lives we have been a part of have left us better than before. As this is my first blog entry I thought I'd list the cast and crew, set the flavor. This year marks several big anniversaries in my life; ten years of marriage, twelve years post brain surgery for a "benign" tumor, six years post complete hysterectomy and six years since a very nice man told me "you have MS.".
These things led us to think we would never have children, thus we started filling in the child shaped holes with work, play and church. Church. That is were our journey into foster care began. Some dear friends started talking about starting a Royal Family Kids Camp, Inc. in our area of Washington and we thought it would be a great way to get to help out and be with kids who needed to just be loved. RFKC is a camp for foster children only from the ages of seven to eleven, it does not cost the state, the children or the foster families anything. At all.
So we went through training for camp and training to be foster parents about the same time, thinking we would only want young children in our home. God has a great sense of humor; camp taught my husband and I we could and did want to work with children no matter what age they were and no matter what baggage they may have. This was in 2005.
Today we are a family of nine; five forever children and two foster children. I stopped working at as Office Manager so I could devote myself to these children we adopted. Currently the ages in our home are newborn girl, 22 month old boy, 5 year old girl, 7 year old boy, 11 year old boy and 16 years (x2 one girl and one boy.) Right before we got our first placement we adopted a huge German Shepard because we thought kids were not coming to our lives.
It is loud here.
We currently home school the three youngest school aged kids because their "behavior interferes with their learning." This line was repeated over and over on report cards, in parent/teacher meetings, in parent/principal meetings, in IEP meetings and in the various phone calls I fielded. We decided that home school would better support their needs until we could teach them better ways to deal with life and it worked, next year all three will be returning to mainstream school. We have returned a few children home, one child went to relatives, one went to another home to be with siblings, one we had removed due to sexual aggression. We have done tons of respite because we are able to handle multiple special needs kids at once. Personally, I think it is because I am a full time mom.
Our passion is sibling groups, we adopted three siblings and we currently have a foster child that is full blooded siblings with one of our other children. I think kids deserve to get to grow up as siblings, in the same home. That is just how it should be. Especially since I found out about to weeks ago I have a half brother that I never knew existed. Our father died in 1979 and he never told my mom about my brother...so I know first hand what it is like to long for siblings and to find out late in life that they exist. So if I write about any of my foster children the girls will all be named Eve and the boys all named Adam...since the stories are really more about the humanity behind fostering children than anything else. These kids are REAL people with all sorts of complicated feelings and losses. Whew...that is heavy stuff. More next Saturday night.
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