Wednesday, February 18, 2009

So so so blessed!

Sorry this has taken me a little bit longer to update everybody on my major praise that I mentioned on Facebook late Monday night. I was so exhausted for some reason by the end of that day that I literally crashed that night - still fully clothed, flopped down on top of all the covers, and with over half the lights on throughout the apartment :) I felt a little sheepish waking up the next morning and realizing what I’d done!

Yesterday was better but still distractable with putting together ***drumroll, please*** my praises of both a regular toddler bed and a convertable bed that transitions from a crib to a toddler daybed to a full-size bed frame!!!!!!!!! Granted, they aren’t the twin-size bunkbeds I had been eyeing at Walmart for almost $200, but God blessed me with these as gifts from a complete stranger who had heard of my hopes and dreams of wanting to foster adopt. I still need to get a crib mattress for the second bed (the lady was only able to give me one of those) along with some bedding sheets and bed wetting pads and one more pillow but God has helped in covering the more major expense of the beds themselves! I was just a little hyper with the happiness from receiving them that night before I crashed!

Other unexpected blessings have included a large bag of miscellaneous toddler to early-gradeschool-age toys, a large bag of childrens clothing that ranged from size 18 months all the way up to size 12, and a small toddler-sized ride-on toy. The bedroom is looking a lot more like it belongs to two little girls and the living room is looking pretty chaotic! My next chore is getting that one back under control :)

As far as the PRIDE training sessions, last Saturday we had a double seesion day (6 very long hours) and covered the topics of strengthening family relationships, both those with the biological family for possible reunification and with the foster family in learning it’s OK to make new attachments as well without the child feeling guilty in doing so. We also discussed discipline; learning the differences between discipline and punishment and methods of discipline that may of been different from ways that we were brought up with but that are recommended for working with children who have suffered trauma from abuse and neglect since physical punishment cannot be used under any circumstances with these children. Last night was session seven, continueing family relationships, which leaves us with only one more regular session before our final session which is going to be done up very differently from the rest with a whole panel of speakers who will be sharing with us and allowing a good bit of time for questions and answers. Session eight is going to be tomorrow night (Feb. 19th) and the final session will be Monday of next week (Feb. 23rd). After that will be a second attempt at having Orientation (Feb. 28th) since the first attempt got snowed out on us; it still feels wierd having Orientation last :)

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Beginning stages of the homestudy

Sing the wondrous joys of home study,
Sing the wondrous joys of stress,
Through the paperwork and inspections,
I’ll prepare for them a place!

I am absolutely convinced that you’ve got to have a sense of humor about these things! The inspections have yet to start but the paperwork has definitely begun. In the pre-service training we’re calling it “homework” but the importance of completing it has been made quite clear to us. While our individual papers aren’t being looked at and discussed in class, we’ve been told that our home-finder will be wanting to see and discuss them as we work through the paperwork for the home study.

Last week, the two visits with my family doctor were done and my physical completed. Today, I’m going to try and turn my rough draft of a genogram (basically, a pictorial version of my genealogy) into a nice, neat final copy. I’ve also begun working on what they call an ecomap which shows a pictorial view of my connections to other individuals and to the community. And there’s still lots and lots of case studies to work on, charts to fill out, a million questions to answer, and chapters of reading yet to go. I’m feeling like I’m back in school again and never been more excited to be so!

I’m also spending part of my days going through the apartment doing a lot of sorting out, some discarding, re-organizing, and trying to figure out how to redo furniture arrangements to turn a one-bedroom apartment into two-bedrooms while still trying to feel like I have a living room. My preference would really very much be to have an actual two-bedroom first but I’m also dependent on HUD for my housing and they are being quite stubborn on the issue that I need to have a child already living with me to move up to a two-bedroom voucher. Oh, the joys of HUD as well! (Though I can’t be too hard on them; I couldn’t have my own place without them.)

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

The latest news...

So far, we’ve watched a couple short videos in each PRIDE training session and also have short descriptions read of different types of abuse situations that children have possibly had to endure before they entered the foster care system. In all but the first training session, we’ve taken time to discuss them as a group. I’ve struggled with these in a couple different ways. They tend to both stir up memories of abuse that I endured as a child and, as I get to listen to the others who share their thoughts on them, I struggle with feeling so different from the rest of the group.

There’s only one other woman in the group that’s made it known that she came from an abusive background as well; she was adopted out of the system herself. So many of the others have expressed disbelief that people could actually treat children in some of the ways that are acted out in the video scenes and most of the time I’m sitting there feeling what I had thought was numb and not normal because it seemed so opposite the response of what almost everybody else seemed to be having. It bugs me. I’ve been thinking about it and I guess it’s not really numbness as it is having lived through it first-hand versus someone who grew up in a loving, nurturing home life that probably definitely wanted the kids that lived there. I guess things aren’t as shocking to me on a TV screen after having lived it in 3-D every day for the first 28 years of my life.

The training sessions are required to help us in learning more about how to work with and handle children who have been traumatized by abuse but they also seem to be having the extra benefit of understanding different ways that I used to be in my own reactions and behaviors as I was growing up and even a little as an adult. It’s really the first time for me in a number of areas that I’m finally understanding some of the reasons why I turned out the way that I did and why I had so many obstacles to overcome in the last several years. Both sessions three and four are on meeting developmental needs; last Monday’s was on attachments and tomorrow night’s (Thursday’s) is going to be in how losses affect that.

I learned something new while meeting with my worker at the HUD office earlier this week. She also has gone through the process for foster care and adoption and let me know that actually you can go ahead and have a child placed with you even though you’re living in a one-bedroom apartment. The only problem is I have to be willing to sleep in the living room and give the bedroom to the child since one of the requirements is for the child to have their own space and privacy; apparantly, it’s not required for the adult caring for the child to have it though. Hummmmm… it has me wondering. Once I have a child placed with me then I can qualify for a two-bedroom voucher so it wouldn’t be a long term situation so maybe it could actually be tolerable for a little while; it’s going to take a lot of thinking on how I’m going to be able to rearrange so much stuff though. I really wish this apartment came with some storage space :)

One short, final note: I had my physical yesterday and that went really well. The only special note he made on it was for children two years of age and older ONLY. But I already was expecting that. Outside of going back Friday to have the TB Tine test checked, and possibly a chest x-ray since I’ve been known to come back with “false positives” on that, my physical is complete. That’s one more part of the homestudy process that I can check off the list!