Our initial response to doing foster care: Expectations vs. Reality

Cody and I have been having some really good conversations about our foster care experience so far, our expectations vs. reality, and our hopes and goals for our future in foster care.  We've both noticed numerous people mentioning to us, quietly, that they've wondered about or thought about doing foster care, but haven't looked into it.  We both think that there are certain people cut out for foster care, and those people are the ones who get passing thoughts like, "maybe I could do that".  Literally the only requirement I see is the desire to help a child.  You don't need to be rich, married, working or not, childless, homeowning, looking to adopt, or anything else.  You need a spare bedroom.

Foster care has pretty much gone how we expected, with some things a little harder in practice, and a few things a little easier.  The bigger kids are generally a LOT easier than I had thought.  They're potty-trained, they know how to read, they can play together outside, they're at school for most of the day, and they eat about as much PB&J as predicted.  The emotional effects of being taken from their home and caregivers does come out occasionally in tears, tantrums, the silent treatment, and boundary-pushing, but that's part of foster care; it's just a little different thinking and hearing about it versus experiencing it.  It still sucks, but it's not as bad as I anticipated, and it happens a lot less often than I prepared myself for.  I think if you educate yourself on the whys of foster care, it makes the whats a lot easier to handle.

When we were certified for foster care, we said that we were open to children ages 0-18, but that we preferred children between ages 4-10 due to our current life situation.  (We are also resource parents for teen foster children in group homes, which is based on check-outs while they live somewhere else.)  We were certified to host two children, as we have one spare bedroom with two twin beds available upstairs, while we're remodeling our basement which has two more rooms and a living room downstairs.  When we got the call about our three current foster children who were in the process of being removed from their home, we were asked if we could make an exception to host three children instead of two, including an infant, so that they didn't have to be separated.  We were a little nervous about the added challenge, but our hearts answered first and we said yes after a 5-minute discussion while the caseworker waited on the other line.  We keep joking to each other that next time we're definitely going to stick to our guns and keep it at two children who are at least potty-trained, but we both know we're way too soft to promise that.  You can't predict who will need you, when.  We had been asked about two or three different children before we accepted our first placement, though.  For each of them, we didn't feel like it was right, yet we did with our placement, even though it didn't make much logical sense.