Adoption Update!

Journey of Peace

My act of self-kindness for Day 19 was...

Watching as Brooke and three of her friends just acted like teenage girls. Fourteen is such a weird/wonderful age...they are mature but not mature, serious but silly, grown up but still a child. They stunted (cheerleading), they ate a TON of spaghetti for dinner, they giggled, they talked, they did makeovers, they even played with the doll that Brooke begged for a few years ago (that looks and feels real). It's so amazing to watch these girls become young ladies but not TOO fast!



Adoption Update:

We got some more information on the kids. There are a few things in the information that would probably make some families run screaming but after 8 1/2 years of fostering I think we have seen and dealt with just about everything! Will these kids need counseling/therapy - yes, but from experience I think they have a chance of being normal wonderful kids if they are placed into the right loving family now. There will be some hard work involved and it won't be all roses and rainbows but these kids are worth it! We let our worker know that we are still interested in being considered for them (I think she thought we would back out) but also that we are aware that there are several families interested and that we would like to continue to receive any profiles of kiddos that she thinks might be a possible match for us.

We had to fill out a Cultural Assessment for these kids because they are of a different race than us. I will admit that I'm a little miffed that we are being asked "why we want to consider adopting a child of another culture". We wrote "We believe we can love and care for a child of any culture". A child is a child to us...culture, race, heritage doesn't really play a part in it to us. We have parented children of pretty much every culture in the past nine years and have never felt that it made a difference, we loved and cared for all of the children the same.

So now we wait to see if we are one of the three families chosen to be included in the Best Interest Staffing (BIS) where they will thoroughly look at each family to find the best possible match for these children :-)