Busy, busy, busy

I can't believe it's been 2 1/2 weeks since Trish came. This summer is going so fast!!! Everyone has adjusted really well, and it seems like Trish has been part of the family for much more than a few weeks. The novelty has pretty much worn off and she is just one of the gang now. She is great with the kids and has enjoyed being able to be a kid herself as she does things with them.

We've been running 3 miles almost every night (Trish and I are planning to do a half marathon this fall), went to watch my brother at Special Olympics, went to Bio Blitz at the Wildlife Refuge, fed the ducks, went to the zoo, went to the Discovery Center Science Museum, went to Messiah's Mansion (a life size replica of the tabernacle in Moses time), had Cub Scout Day camp, and spent the last 3 days doing Idaho Youth Games. For the Idaho Youth Games, Trish volunteered with Stephen and I and had lots of fun helping the other kids do swimming, bowling, a one mile race, a mini triathlon, and a "fun night" with lots of bounce houses and activities.

She has jumped into the youth activities at church and is going to be leaving for girls camp on Monday morning for 4 days! She is also taking 2 high school classes this summer, Health and Eng 10A, so she spends time each day working on those. I think she has been surprised at how busy we are and how many fun things there are to do. She also loves to take photos, so now I have tons of fun pictures to add to the blog; I just have to get her in front of the camera too!

Here are some pictures from the zoo!

She's here!!!

We picked up Trish yesterday, finally! We are happy to be through with this set of hoops and I think she is happy to be settling in. It will be an adjustment for her to get used to the kids, and hopefully the kids will move past the novelty stage quickly. They want to follow her everywhere, sit next to her, help her. . . . Jeanisha is especially loving it and copies everything Trish does. If Trish has eggs, Jeanisha wants eggs, if Trish puts ranch on her sandwich, so does Jeanisha. Trish seems to think it is cute for now. Hopefully Jeanisha moves past it before it becomes annoying. She is just so excited to finally get a sister. And to have it be a big sister who likes make up and clothes and girly stuff is just bonus!

Patience

I don't really like learning patience. I would really like to just see where I am going and not have to trust. We still don't have Trish. They didn't give us some paperwork they needed to have filled out before our home visit until Friday the 21st. (We were planning to get Trish on the 22nd.)The different regions of the state have a hard time working together and communicating, plus the caseworkers are a bit overloaded right now. But it's still frustrating. I turned in the paperwork on Monday, they came and did the home visit on Tuesday and told me we needed a screen around the fireplace and to get the carpets cleaned. I knew they needed cleaned, but I was waiting until we finished potty training Adam. And they had told us over and over in our 27 hour training class that the home visit was not to look for cleanliness, but for safety issues. (And I had everything else clean and ready anyway.) Luckily, I have a good friend whose husband has a carpet cleaning business and he came the next morning. My carpets look brand new, which is pretty impressive considering the wear and tear that comes from 5 kids! (If you live in the area, their business is Superior Cleaning and the number is 453-2945.)

She came for the revisit on Wed. afternoon, and passed us off to get our foster care license. Thursday I tried calling every 30 minutes, but the phone system was down or something and I was never able to get through to Trish's caseworker. Then they were off for a furlough day on Friday, and then the long weekend. Maybe we can make something happen this week.

Update: I just found out TODAY that the office I was working with was closed on May 27th due to budget cuts. Nice of them to let us know. The phone number I have was disconnected and I've spent the morning tracking down the caseworker's new number, only to get a message saying she will check her messages after she gets all moved over to the new office. At least this explains why I couldn't get a response to phone calls or emails all last week! Patience is NOT fun!

As far as Emilio goes, we've went through the big box of paperwork, and the additional paperwork they sent last week. We are waiting to hear back on a couple things, but then hopefully we can proceed there. So much for being able to bring him home in early June, we havn't even went down for a visit yet. We were told by friends to expect the process to take 4-6 months, even though the state workers were saying 2 months. Every step so far has taken much longer than we were told, so we just keep waiting and praying for it all to work out.

And, just in case we don't have enough waiting to do right now, we put an offer in on a short sale house yesterday in Nampa. I guess I'll learn patience one way or the other.

Adoption update and Moving beds

Ten more days until we pick up Trish. This is an old picture, but doesn't she look sweet? Also, the box of info on Emilio was sent out today! So things are finally moving with that. Maybe??? The caseworker is back from family leave, so that should help.

We've been moving furniture and food storage and making room for 2 more kids. We cleaned out the food storage/storage room and moved Lincoln's crib in that room. Then we bought some bunkbeds off craigslist and set them up for Jeanisha and Trish. Once we got them all set up, we realized they block the window/fire escape, so we're going to have to trade them with the one Ryan and Adam are using right now. Hopefully we can get that done tomorrow.

We have taken 4 of the 9 required 3 hour classes to be certified for foster care and just have a few more hoops to jump through. We will finish classes on the 21st and go pick up Trish on the 22nd. She is coming for a 2 week trial to see what she thinks about being part of a large family. She's never really been in a family with lots of younger kids, so hopefully the noise and constant busyness won't be too crazy for her. The kids are super excited. We spent Sunday, May 2nd with her and she seemed to fit in really good and said she felt like she belonged. The kids loved her too! It will be an interesting summer!!!!

Do we want a teenager?

This past week has been a little crazy. Last August, we tried to adopt a teenage girl, but they placed her with her foster family. Her adoption disrupted (didn't go through), and she moved to another foster home. This last week, I got a call at 1:59 pm asking if we wanted her. The state wanted to just sign over legal guardianship to us. "Oh, and the meeting to make a decision is at 2:30 pm, (that day), so if you could please let us know by then."

Hello, I spend more than 30 minutes deciding whether to put the kids in swim lessons or not. And you want me to decide if I want a teenage daughter in 30 minutes. We hadn't heard anything from her or the caseworker since last August, so this totally came out of the blue. And the timing just seems really bad where we just got matched with the little boy in Texas.

We had a 20 minute phone conference with her, the caseworker, and the school counselor where we talked about our rules and expectations. I wanted her to really think about what she would be getting into. We also researched guardianship and learned it is NOT a good option. It is not good for us, it is not good for her. The only people it is good for is the state because it basically moves her off of their rolls, like she aged out of the system. We told them we would not do that, but that we would consider having us live with us under the foster care guidelines on a trial basis. We have only spent 2 hours with her, last August, and had 2 caseworkers there redirecting the conversation. So we want time to get to know her better, and for her to get to know us better and see if this is REALLY what she wants and is willing to commit to making it work. So we are spending this next Sunday with her and then taking the foster care classes in May and then she will come live with us for 2 weeks the end of May. And we'll see what happens after that. She may decide that a family with 5 kids is more than she bargained for. Or it may be a great fit and we'll end up adding a teenage girl and a 6 year old boy this summer. I just keep telling myself it will all work out how it is supposed to.

Not the Easter I imagined

This has been quite the weekend. My sister went into labor yesterday morning, so we have her 3 kids in addition to my 5. All was going great until yesterday afternoon when I was helping the kids dye eggs and Lincoln starting throwing up. EVERYWHERE. A couple hours later, Adam started, followed by Jeanisha, then Karma's 2 year old. (We've been everywhere together this last week during spring break, so both groups of kids got exposed.) The kids threw up constantly all night long. 4-5 times EACH! And of course the little sick ones aren't the best at hitting a bucket. My wonderful husband slept on the floor to take care of Adam and Jeanisha, my mom who had come up to see the baby slept on the couch to take care of Karma's kids, and I slept with and took care of Lincoln. At 7 this morning, Stephen went to sleep and my mom and I continued cleaning up throw up and doing the mountain of laundry until she had to go home.

Stephen and I figure we have cleaned up more throw up in the last 24 hours than in our 11 years of marriage combined. It's been that bad! Luckily of the other 4, 3 have complained of stomach aches, but not thrown up, and Ryan has been fine. So they have played games and watched TV all day. I'm hoping they aren't just waiting.

We told the kids we emailed the Easter bunny and asked him to come later this week when people aren't sick. We didn't get to watch any of today's conference, or make the Easter dinner I had planned. But I don't think this is an Easter I'll forget.

We were selected!!!!

We got THE call yesterday from our social worker that we have been selected as a match for a 6 year old boy in Texas. The picture is from Jan. 2009, so it is old, but it's the best we have at the moment. He is in Kindergarten and loves to play with cars, color, and listen to stories. He likes to play outside and tends to copy other children. (They felt having lots of kids to copy would be good for him. Yeah! Finally someone who sees our larger than average family size as an asset!)

They are getting all of the information from his case file ready to send to us. They have to go through and mark out and identifying info like SSN's and addresses and last names. They said that can take up to two weeks, but they sent it out "with a kind request for expedited service." We'll see what expedited service means when working with government agencies. :) Our social worker said to expect it to take a month. This file is likely 1000-2000 pages!

Once the caseworker gets it back, it will be overnighted to us, and we will be asked to look through it quickly for any deal breakers or things that would make us say he won't fit with our family. If we don't find anything immediately, they will set up travel arrangements for us to go down to Texas and meet him. We will then be able to look through the paperwork in more detail. We have received a 22 page summary already that was very up-to-date with information from this past month! That in itself is pretty amazing.

So, hopefully we will get the box of paperwork relatively soon, and be able to make a trip down to Texas. Emilio's worker is wanting to move things along and hopefully get him in our home the first part of June as school ends.

We are very excited!