foster care change of plans

I haven't blogged for about 2 weeks. There are many reasons for that and they are probably all related to doing foster care for a little girl. It was about 2 weeks ago that Bryan and I came to the conclusion that we will not be adopting our little, 4 year old foster girl. This decision was extremely hard to make because of all of the expectations and emotions that are tied to one complicated little girl. We are confident of our decision after having prayed about this for 6 months and talked with everyone close to us about our family. I am still very emotional at times about our decision and that has led me to not feel like I could write a clear blog post about this. Bryan has done a great job explaining our feelings and situation so I am stealing some of his words.

We went into foster care because we wanted to interact with a family that needed help taking care of their child. We also thought that we might be interested in adoption. Those thoughts have changed and been challenged to extremes we didn't know were possible. We are still very happy that we are foster parents. We will be forever changed by this decision to foster another child. Our potential plan to adopt a foster child will not be happening and so we are dealing with this change in our plans...and that is very difficult right now.

 

We decided 2 weeks ago that we are not equipped to handle three kids and the challenges that would bring in the long term. We told this to our social workers and they said they would look for a new family over the next few months as we hoped to make sure her mom was out of the picture before the transition. The following week we were called with what seems to be the perfect family match for little girl. They had everything we had thought little girl needs and they seem like really great people! We met with the couple on Monday night in preparation for the transition. They will have their first visit with her at their house tonight (Wednesday). We will have a couple visits and an overnight for them to decide about foster care with the plan of adopting her.

 

This is all going fast for us and we are starting to grieve the upcoming loss of little girl and process the guilt of not being able to make everything work. We have dumped so much of our lives into her over the last 6 months and her improvements intellectually, physically and behaviorally have been huge. She doesn't fall down as much; she knows her shapes, colors, numbers to 10 on a good day and many letters now including her name; and her tantrums are free from intentionally hurting herself and shows signs of starting to self regulate by asking us to tickle her before she breaks down. We are now trying to do everything we can to make the transition for her and her new family to be as smooth and as positive as possible. We are even hoping to have future interactions and play dates with her to make sure she knows we enjoy and love her. Please pray for this transition, for her new family/home and for our family to adjust and understand the good we did for this little girl is worth the uncomfortable feelings it brings to let her go to another family. We truly believe that she will be better off in their home than ours and look forward to seeing her do well as a part of their family.