Foster Care Awareness Month

National Foster Care Month 2019 starts today and runs through May 31st.  I've challenged myself to blog each day in the month of May to raise awareness for foster care.  Not every day will be an experience, some days may just be a quote or a statistic, a chance to really raise awareness about foster care and children in care in our communities.  I won't get into deeply personal details but I do feel that sharing part of our story as foster parents and after, may help educate and maybe even help bridge the gap for another person or family to feel ready to explore more about becoming foster parents.


To start off, our journey to foster care was laid out way ahead of us, seeds of faith being planted along the way.  My cousin and his wife were foster parents and we met a few of their kids at different family events over the course of a couple of years.  I thought it was noble that they would take children into their home, but I also feared all the same unknowns most people do.  There's a long list of them, but I always wondered if I would be able to love and let's be honest, tolerate and accept someone else's child in my home.  I mean, at that time, we either hadn't had Henry yet or he was an infant, how would my heart love and care for children that weren't mine and weren't my relatives, but total strangers?  That may sound callous, but if you're honest with yourself, at some point in life, you've been around a kid who was just being a kid and thought "glad he's not going home with me."   I love kids, but other people's kids?  They must be special for taking all that on.

I would later learn that special has a different meaning but I will save that for a future post. 

In May 2013, we went to Henry's school's summer picnic in an attempt to meet other families with kids Henry's age.  While we were eating dinner, a precious lady from the school came over to chat with us.  We talked shortly before she made a comment about her children, we learned that she has seven kids, two of whom were adopted. We related to my cousin's adoption of 3 boys that had just taken place a month earlier.  Mike and I both were intrigued, mentioning that our church had recently had an info session on foster care and adoption, we even told her that we thought it was really cool how much adoption has made a footing in our society, no longer as taboo or hush-hush as it once was. In retrospect, God was absolutely planting and sowing those seeds in our minds and in our hearts. 

More to come.