Fostering?

We decided to go through a Christian agency at first.  There were two issues, one the cost (is it me or is that always were the crisis of faith comes in?).  The second was my age.  I will be 44 this fall and at 45 if we are not chosen by a birth mother our file is deleted.  That is a lot of legwork, costs etc to be deleted.

Some dear friends are going through a custody battle with their foster son who they have had since birth in jail. It's been over a year and the parents were released on a loophole.  My heart has ached praying for the decision to come down from the judge.  Judges are nothing if not unpredictable.  At that point I said "I could never foster."  Yep, you know where this is going, don't you?

At first we thought, we could do respite (basically, babysitting to give foster parents a break, since they cannot use just any childcare for a foster child.)  There are also needs for people to drive kids to appointments for the foster parents and other duties.  Since the process is the same to foster and to do respite we thought this will be a great way to get our home study done and other costly things while we help out people who foster.  So the process began.

In the meantime, a different family we are close friends with were interested in adopting a little girl who had been fostered by friends of theirs for 15 months.  So they were starting the process as well.  They have six children and took some stretching to think about starting over with a toddler since their youngest was 8. As they were wrapping their brain and heart around the idea of this sweet girl a phone call comes.  She asked me if I was sitting down when she told me.  "No one in the system was aware that the birthmom was pregnant and she just gave birth to the little girl's brother, there was a newborn at the hospital!" So there addition of one jumped to two.