Reunited and it feeeels so goooooooood!!! For realsies...how long has it been since I've been able to write anything at all? I'm taking advantage of Chad taking the day off and catching up on some long overdue responses to email and FINALLY posting an update on our crazazy life. As my dear friend Sarah says "Holy cats!!!" It's been over a year since I've posted anything! What have I been doing? Oh wait, raising four kids. FOUR kids, you say? You thought I only had three? Well, you thought right, but in September we added a baby to the mix.
Have I ever told the story of how we got the boys? I tried skimming through to see if I'd written about it, but I can't find it and I'm old (I'm 30 now...ugh) AND I have four kids so I have no memory. Anyway, I used to have the most beautiful convertible that I loved as if it could have been one of my children. It was amazing having the wind in my hair and the sun on my properly sunscreened shoulders. Such bliss :) However, it was el sucko for putting kids in. When we had one foster kid who was five, it was fine..but when we had that baby for a week, or more than two kids...it was useless. I knew the time had come to trade it in for a (gulp) minivan (even now this is painful to talk about. I mean, trading in a hot chick car for a mom mobile??? While I was still in my 20's??? Unthinkable!!) so we got one. Our foster kid was on unsupervised weekend visits at the time so Chad and I were going to go up north to an amazing hotel and spend the weekend after we picked up the van. I called the agency and told them on Thursday that Friday we were getting the van and to call us on Monday with more kids. Twenty minutes later they called us and said they had these two boys who had a sister that was placed elsewhere and could we please take them. Crap. I mean, yay for getting kids, but I REALLY wanted to go to that hotel! (To this day, we have still never been.) Long story short, we got the boys, and eventually their sister, and these are the kids who have become ours forever. I'm glad I didn't turn them down for a weekend on the lake because I would have missed out on three amazing kiddos who make me crazy and fill my heart to the point of bursting with a love like nothing I've ever felt before...all at the same time :)
I say all this to bring up the point that foster kids rarely come at a convenient time. The baby we had for a week came on a day that it was storming, on the evening I had a dance recital for my niece, our foster son was going for his first unsupervised overnight, and on the night before Chad's college graduation...which was taking place on the campus that was over an hour away. And she came with nothing. Like, the smelly outfit she had on and one mismatched outfit in her bag. And a tiny bit of formula. Welcome to our home, baby. Thank goodness for my sister who brought up boxes and boxes of baby clothes for her and for my friend who left bottles on her porch for us and lent us a baby carrier. Our first foster kid was supposed to come to us a couple of days before Christmas. Ummmm, I don't know about you, but I don't happen to keep a fresh supply of gifts around for those "just in case" times. (I will say I did have some friends drop by gifts for him to help us out and my mother would have loved nothing more than some emergency Christmas shopping.). We got two kids on the night before I was having my youth group girls over for a sleepover. We got a respite kid during a week I was leading MAX Camp. Another respite kid came needing a meds refill and on the night I was supposed to be having a friend from out of town over for dinner. I got a call last week to take in a little girl for a couple of weeks that I didn't have anything prepared for and Chad was working third shift so he was leaving for work soon. Thankfully, I tricked another foster parent into taking her, and then she wound up going to a relative anyway ;) And then this little one that we have now...I was supposed to get three afternoons a week to myself this school year. My oldest was in school all day and the younger two had preschool. From noon to three was going to be my time to clean, read my Bible, do my grocery shopping, and even volunteer in their classrooms. Not to mention work on my knitting projects. Deep down I knew it was never going to happen though and I kept telling people God would give us a baby before I got that much free time. I should have taken up bets on it...I'd be rich right now!!! No joke, on the Friday afternoon before the younger two's preschool started, the very day after I had just emailed a friend to rejoice in the fact I was going to have time to get some extra projects done, and the very day that our kids were going to Grandma's house for a couple of nights because it was our anniversary weekend...whilst I was plotting out knitting patterns from some homemade crafty Christmas presents I was going to make for my nieces no less...the phone rang with that special ringtone I had assigned to the agency. Shocker. There was this baby, they said....that was still at the hospital, they told me...would I be interested, they asked...YES!!!!!, I shrieked.
It was a little bit of a blur after that. There were a lot of frantic phone calls for baby supplies and a super frantic phone call to my husband to make sure it was okay to have a baby. You see, he had just started grad school for his MBA on the accelerated program too. Whoops. But he was pretty cool with it. I mean, a baby still at the hospital with seemingly no health complications is the Holy Grail of foster kids. I mean, we loved our kids to pieces, but a baby was something we (mostly me) always wanted. I had recently been feeling a little blue that I had never had the experience of being kept up all night by some screaming, helpless little being. I felt for sure that when my daughter grew up and had kids that she wouldn't be able to call me for help because I had nothing to offer. Yay for me for adopting these kids, but as a Grandma I would be a loser and just as lost as my daughter as to how to calm a crying infant. (I know this sounds incredibly stupid and silly...but these are the things that run through my nutso brain. No worries...I see a therapist and she tells me I'm nuts too. In her professional opinion.)
Anywho, a couple of hours later we got a call confirming the baby was coming into care and was being placed with us. However, they had found out at trial that the baby had some health complications and were we willing to deal with that. I have always said that I would take a baby even if they were blue with purple spots as long as they didn't require a wheelchair because all our bedrooms are upstairs so of course I agreed. Our kids went off with their Grandma for the weekend and we went in a vicious rainstorm to the hospital to meet the baby. Birth mom was still there spending the last little bit of time she could with the baby so we went to Target to give her some time and did a Supermarket Sweep of the baby aisle and bought everrrrrryyyything. A carseat, bottles...which bottles..I don't know, these bottles...I've heard of them and they're cheaper than the other bottles...sounds good. Formula, we need formula. Oh, and a bottle brush. And pacifiers. And sleepers..but what size? How big is this baby...I have no clue...and what the crap, if they're under 8 lbs they need the newborn size still...ugh...what do we do? Sleep sacks!! Genius...No, Chad..that's blue...trust me...you're colorblind, stop smiling like it's some magical pink thing, it's blue....no, that's blue too...so's that...CHAD, frogs, puppies, and dump trucks are boy things, kitties, butterflies, and flowers are girls...duckies are neutral. Yes, that's for a girl but she doesn't need a 9 month size right now...I promise. Let's go check out and head back up to see her...fine, Chad, she can have that toy...you're a sucker for this baby already and you haven't even met her yet, we're screwed.
A million dollars later, and we were back up to the hospital. The birth mom was still there and we didn't want to be those jerks who kicked her out of the room so we could look at the baby we were "taking" from her so we hid in this dark hallway while the nurses told her it was time to go. They had let her stay longer than she was supposed to anyway and man oh man, I love me some nurses. The baby was crying her head off when they came and got us (it had gotten a little emotional) and we walked to where a nurse was holding her. She said "let's give her to foster mom" and unceremoniously plunked this screaming infant into my arms. And there, in the middle of a dim hospital hallway, I fell in love with the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. She was also the loudest baby I had ever heard. She still is, too. But since I am often the loudest person anyone has ever heard, I appreciate her volume. We spent a few hours with her that night and I went shopping for her early the next morning. We took her home that Saturday afternoon. I had never had so little sleep in my life, but it was worth it to me. The next day was my nephew's baptism so we loaded everyone up and took the baby on her first major outing to meet the family. My sister had once again come through with baby clothes (while throwing the party since it was for her son!) and my mom had put on her Super Grandma outfit (that matches the one Chad's mom wears from time to time) and bought everything I hadn't even thought of but most definitely needed for a baby.
Foster kids rarely come at a convenient time. I look back at all the kids we've gotten and I think of all the rescheduling and shuffling and rearranging we've had to do. Sometimes I get put out when I'm thinking about how much work I'm having to do or what I'm missing out on so we can take a placement....and then I think, this kid is getting ripped from their family and placed in a stranger's home. They've got a ton of unfamiliar adults telling them everything's going to be okay and smiling at them in what's supposed to be a reassuring way, but I'm sure is a little scary looking. They rarely get to take any of their favorite things with them and they have no idea what's going on. If anyone is truly inconvenienced by a foster placement, it's the kids. They're the ones who get the short end of the stick in all of this. Yes, the abuse stops for them, and yes, they are no longer hungry or cold or dirty, but their world is turned upside down and they don't yet possess the maturity to comprehend or deal with what is happening. The bright spot in all of this is that the foster parent now gets the chance to show them what true love looks like and hopefully, everything will be okay for them someday :)
Dang...look how much I can babble about when the baby is napping and the hubby is home!!! He should take the day off more often! Hopefully I can add more soon :) It's been a crazy eight months and I have oh so much more to tell.
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