Utah Foster Care

 Okay so it's time for an update. We have been approved and licensed to be Utah Foster Parents! We took two, 4 hour classes every week for a month...then prepared our condo for the home study...the had the home study...our home study was finally sent to a committee where they reviewed our file and determined that we would be good resource parents for the state!

The classes were awesome, taught by the fabulous Liz Rivera (here's an article about her! http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=441&sid=19008668). We just love Liz, I feel like she is part of our family now :) She is smart, kind, caring, generous, and most importantly dedicated. She taught us so much. To ready our condo we were required to purchase things like fire extinguishers, baby gates, fist aid kits, cabinet locks...we had to make sure all of our chemicals and medications were locked, have emergency phone numbers in our home and cars, lock up our firearms and power tools...basically make our house 10 times safer than any normal person's home LOL

We got the "kid's room", as we are calling it now, all ready with a crib and a twin bed, dresser, glider, shelves, books, etc. Just the basics. But we haven't bought any clothing items. I've thought about it, like just getting one pair of pjs and one outfit, just to be sure that if we have a placement on super short notice that we will have something. But that would mean buying those items for both male and female and for every age from newborn to 8 years old. So I decided against it :) We'll just wait for a placement first.

So now we are all ready to go, and it's just a waiting game! We likely won't have any placements until at least the middle of May, because we have a cruise scheduled for the first week of May. And we would hate to create more disruption for the child by taking the placement, and then having them go to respite care (something similar to daycare, but specifically for children in foster care) while we are gone. The goal is to have the child in a consistent, loving, and stable home - and putting them in respite so soon after having them placed with us would likely create unnecessary additional stress for the child. Sooo, basically we hope to have a placement this summer! :)

My next update will probably be once we have a placement. So just a few things to keep in mind

1.) The safety and privacy of the child are #1, so you will never see me post a pic of his/her face.
2.) I will never use his/her real name on this blog or Facebook - I will always use a nickname of some kind.
3.) If you come to check out my blog and find that it has been made private, please send me a request to add you! I will only change it to private if I feel like the child's safety and privacy have been compromised.

I hope I'm back sooner, rather than later, with a new update! Until then...