Saturday, September 7, 2013

Live, Laugh, Love

This week we completed week 3 of our adoption/foster care class. It was a much different feeling than week 2 where I was very overwhelmed. This week I anticipated would be difficult for me being about gains and losses. I thought they were going to focus mostly on infertility loss, boy was I wrong. The losses they showed us were losses that we all experience, these losses are called maturational losses. Examples are birth we lose the womb, but we gain life, or when we potty training we lost privacy, comfort (in diapers) but we gained some independence and dignity in being able to use the bathroom. These maturational losses and gains happen from birth till death, its the situational ones that are harder on us, like the loss of a job, or family member or in our case being put in foster care or being adopted means you have lost your parents. Now in most cases they didn't die but you lost what is normal to you and it wasn't planned that this would happen. In this class we became loss experts and we had to learn to identify what losses children had experienced and how to help them grieve. This also helped us identify what types of losses we could handle, if you have just lost a parent and haven't grieved yourself probably wouldn't be a good choice to take a child going through the same process, but if you have completed the process you could be a great choice to help this child through that tough time. We have to learn to live with what has happened and we learned that while children in foster care or who are adopted should never be forced or asked to accept what has happened to them, but to continue to live they need to understand what has happened to them and why.

One thing I love about our class is our classmates. All are there for many different reason and have a lot of experience. We can laugh about funny experience and learn from them. I was very overwhelmed last week and voiced that to my leaders and one of my classmates explained that its all about patience and love. I was told that with my experience in child care and seeing different levels of behavior I will be fine. All my experience in the past has given me a lot more hope that when we get our child (ren) we will be fine.  Our classes are not all serious we can laugh about funny things that are said or done and hearing how others have made mistakes that seem so silly now, but that you just have to be ok with apologizing for that mistake and hopefully you don't make it again.

We have our first home study visit next week and while I was very worried about that our class ensured us that we don't need to dust and go all crazy on cleaning, but there are things that are needed. Things even people who birth their own child should have. 1) fire extinguisher 2) carbon monoxide detector and 3) meds locked in a lock box. We learned that you should be no more than 40 feet from a extinguisher...that seems pretty excessive but they really aren't that expensive, ours was 18.99 at home depot. Carbon Monoxide is a big issue and everyone should have one in there house, just need 1 per floor. The one that most don't think about is meds. I have a lot of meds from my recent stint in the hospital for a blood clot and we were told everything down to Tylenol and sports rubs needs to be locked up. Again seems excessive but kids can get into this stuff at any age. We think of it mostly for babies or young kids but if you have a child who is going through depression in adolescents, pills could be a way for them hurt themselves, but if they are locked it reduces that risk. I would never tell anyone they have to do this, but we first thought this was going to be a pain in the butt, but it really has shown us how safe it will be. We are very excited for our home study because we will learn more about what types of children we want to take and ages and needs. I know that we are going to try to adopt a sibling group. I know many probably are thinking wow from no kids to two kids will be a huge change, but what many don't know is that sibling groups are really hard to place because people don't want to take that many children on. I would love to reassure a child that they will never be split from their siblings. The only thing I'm thinking about now as we go into the 4 class and our home study is only 6 more weeks and we can't wait to hopefully get 2 kiddos here to our family so we can just start loving those kiddos with all our heart.

Hope you all have a great weekend.
Lots of Love C&C

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