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Life is about to get crazy

I'm not even sure how to begin this. We're about to make a huge life change. It's so big I don't even know how deeply it will effect us. It will change the course of our lives and possibly several others as well. How do you explain that?

We've decided to become foster parents. To teenagers. One teenager, actually. We don't know who yet. We just know we have one extra bedroom and one slice of love left to give.

My job is challenging. That's not the right word but hard isn't the right word either. My actual job duties are satisfying and sort of come natural to me. I enjoy researching and writing and educating. That's all good. What's challenging is being surrounded by stories of broken families all day and not doing anything to directly effect change. There are so many kids out there in need of a good home and all day I'm a cheer leader to everyone else saying "Get involved!" and yet I'm doing nothing.

Yes, I'm busy. I wake up, put you girls in the car and head off to work and when I return home at night the sun is close to going down and dinner needs to be made and then it's bed time. I don't have a lot of free time to volunteer. But I love being a mom and if someone else needs a mom--I can do that.

I can make my meals a little bigger to feed one more mouth. I have a little extra money to buy clothes or school supplies for one more person. I have time on the weekends and evenings to sit and to talk and to run and to play and to enjoy one more person. I just need the opportunity. So here we go.

Brendon was just talking a few months ago about feeling like we've never taken any real big risk. We've been so blessed. We've never had a need to move anywhere far away or experience anything truly out of our comfort zones. We need that.

So why teenagers? Well, simply put, babies aren't my strong suit. I'm pretty good at communicating though. And teens seem to love Brendon, which is cool. And Brendon needs someone to play basketball with--of course. And there's a huge need. So why not?

At work I'm always in and out of trainings about trauma adverse childhood experiences and foster care and I'm aware the kids coming into our home will not be angels. They will be broken. They will be depressed. They will be struggling. And yet--I also attend many trainings where those kids have met that one person or that one couple that just made all the difference. They've come out on the other side and they are normal and they are OK and they are not scary. Somehow, I just have this confidence that together, we can handle it. 

We've been working on trying to teach you about what's coming. Eisley has no clue. Kaybree knows a big brother is coming to stay with us. We don't know anything about him yet, so we don't have many details to share. We've talked about how something mommies and daddies can't take care of their kids. Sometimes they need some place safe to stay. Sometimes they go into foster care.

 We don't know if he'll get angry easily. We don't know if he'll be violent. We don't know if he'll be rude or insensitive to a little girls feelings. We just have hope that he'll feel comfortable with us. We have hope that when he meets us he'll want to be a part of our family and that we'll be able to make him feel like he is.

We've found a great licensing agency to go through the process with. They focus on teenagers and they choose cases carefully. They'll give us opportunities to meet the child before he comes into our home. We'll have lunch, then overnight visits, then weekend visits, then a move in. They'll do their best to identify behaviors and to provide us with resources to handle things. So far we're six weeks into the 10 week classes we must take beforehand and our home is just a few checkmarks from being deemed "safe."

We don't know what we don't know. We don't know how this will change us, or change you, or change others. But we have hope.

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