Our Daycares Saga

Its a long saga so pour a cup o’ coffee and get cozy.

On the whole, Seth and I have been really lucky with daycares. Choosing a daycare is such a monumental task because your child is going to spend more waking hours at daycare than at home with you during the week. So how do we go about finding and selecting a daycare, and who have Seth and I chosen to care for our kids?

The first daycare we used was a center. It was conveniently located close to downtown Syracuse where Seth and I worked, and served us well for Kiddo. It was easy to find day care for Kiddo and Brother because they were older – it’s the really little ones (under 2) that it’s so hard to find daycare for.

So the center we chose was absolutely great for Kiddo, but Brother, with his behaviors, got expelled really quickly for trying to kill two children. He tried to suffocate a little boy and tried to strangle an older girl. At the time he firmly believed there were zombies inside of them that he needed to kill. Remember, Brother was six years old at the time. The day that happened was the day we knew he couldn’t stay with us and needed a higher level of care. We’d been suspecting that almost since he came to us but that cinched it. If he couldn’t stay in daycare we couldn’t have him with us because Seth and I both worked full time at that time. Sigh. It hurts to think about how sick Brother was back then. I’m so intensely proud of him for how far he’s come and thrilled that he is doing so much better these days.

Anywho, after Brother left, Kiddo stayed at that daycare. One of the reasons we had chosen a center was so that Kiddo could be in pre-K because she had just turned four. Her pre-K teachers were amazing. It was a man and a woman, and both were compassionate, kind, loving people who were insanely good with a room full of rambunctious four-year-olds. Kiddo got SUPER attached to her Miss Natalie in particular, which was so good to see. We always worry about attachment issues with our kids and it was reassuring to know Kiddo could get attached to someone. Miss Natalie even babysat Kiddo a few times outside of daycare.

The director of that daycare at the time was great and shockingly was trauma informed. I’ll use that phrase from time to time and it means that the person has had training in what happens to kids when they experience trauma, and what behaviors may emerge, and how to deal with those behaviors in a compassionate and helpful way rather than just punishing kids for misbehaving. Kiddo has her own set of behaviors – never as severe as Brother’s, but sometimes pretty dang challenging. She got written up a few times, requiring us to sit down with the director to go over what had happened and strategize as to how to prevent that sort of behavior in the future. We loved that daycare the whole time that first director was there as she was a good partner to work with, and a good leader.

Kiddo at daycare

Unfortunately, that director got shuffled to another location and after that we had a mixed bag of rotating directors and assistant directors. Some were quite good but didn’t last long. Some were less good. And we felt like the lack of consistent strong leadership made things slide.

Gronckle went to that daycare which worked out ok. They once made a mistake and fed him the wrong formula despite our having brought in bottles of the correct formula. He got a bit sick from it but thankfully not super sick. But that incident was a bit alarming – what if his allergies had been more severe? Yikes. Overall though, he was a healthy rambunctious toddler who was popular with the staff and who thrived there.

Then we sent Mouse there and holy Hannah, it was a rapid downhill slide. She had a very strict set of instructions for how she could be handled because she had such severe medical issues. We passed along the instructions to the staff in her room. But they couldn’t keep consistent staffing in that room and didn’t train new people sometimes at all. When she first got there and was projectile vomiting after feedings they kept telling us she had to go home and couldn’t come back the next day despite the doctors’ assurance that the vomiting was not a sign of an illness that was contagious. That was supremely frustrating as I couldn’t get even two consecutive days in the office. There were limits on how fast a swing could be set to swing for her – she had to stay at a low level of motion because of her head injury – and we came in and found the swing set on high with her in it. That was straight up dangerous. Once we figured out she needed special formula, they mixed up her formula like they had done with Gronckle, and for Mouse the consequences were much more severe. We kept trying to work with the staff in that room and making complaints and the daycare finally put one stable staff person in that room who knew all of Mouse’s needs so we had hope it was going to improve.

Then the county abruptly told us she could no longer go to that daycare because of regulatory violations at that center. The county gave us one day of notice that we had to move Mouse to another daycare. I took yet another day off work and kept Mouse home with me and started making phone calls to daycares seeking a place for her.

I called thirty seven daycares in two days. All I got was a crying jag because I was so frustrated and panicked.

I finally called Kiddo’s old case worker, who has remained a good friend and amazing resource for us, and told her we were going to have to disrupt Mouse’s placement if we didn’t find a daycare for her STAT. She came through for us as always. She knew of a licensed daycare that takes DSS payments that doesn’t advertise because she doesn’t need to, and with whom the caseworker had had good experiences. That daycare just happened to have an opening for a child under 18 months. Just like that, Mouse had a place at a new daycare.

And that daycare is a gem! The woman who runs it is named Pam, and she’s from the Dominican Republic. It’s a bilingual daycare, and Pam is smart and sophisticated and loves kids like crazy. She’s also insanely patient because not only did she take care of Mouse brilliantly, she also took care of PB&J, and those two are a handful. Pam is the one who labeled Jelly “spicy,” which is a term that stuck for her. All Jelly’s service providers agreed it suited her. And Pam loved that spicy toddler to bits.

Unfortunately we had to stop using Pam once the twins went home because I stopped working downtown and Seth’s classes went online because of Covid and it was too far for us to drive a child on a daily basis. It’s 20+ minutes from our house, and that’s a lot of time and miles that we don’t need. I still miss Pam because she’s flat-out amazing. She texts to say hi every once in a while and who knows. Maybe once Seth is working as a nurse in a downtown hospital, we’ll use her again. For Black and Latino kids especially, Pam’s is the perfect place.

Tiny didn’t go to daycare for a long time when she first came to us because she was too sick and not eating and needed to be basically force fed pediasure with a syringe every hour, then every 2 hours, then every 2 1/2 hours, and so on. And I quit my job downtown and wound up unemployed for 4 months so that worked out perfectly. Once she was finally healthy enough to go to daycare and I started working again, I once again started the process of seeking a place for her. She was 2 though, which makes it way easier to find a spot. And once again we got lucky – we found Debbie and her son Randy who run a great in-home daycare only about 5 minutes from our house. Tiny is spoiled rotten there and Debbie takes amazing care of us.

Tiny is only in daycare half days (mornings) right now because that’s all we can afford. Since Seth is in school rather than working, the county doesn’t pay for daycare directly – the law has a flaw in it and doesn’t cover daycare for students, and the county is wicked short on funds right now especially because of Covid so they don’t have spare cash to make an exception. We nearly got ourselves fired for arguing with them about it. Sigh. Oh well. Lesson learned. But that is a state law that needs changing, STAT. I’m not working quite full time yet anyway, so it works out, but as I’m getting busier we need more daycare hours but can’t really afford them. This last semester of Seth’s schooling should get interesting as my work levels are ramping up pretty rapidly, but of course I’m not getting paid for the work yet. Thank heavens I work from home and everyone so far is forgiving of a shrill toddler voice in the background on phone calls! And Debbie has been super flexible and has helped us out in a couple of pinches, too. We’ll manage to juggle it. We always do!

What it takes to get licensed as a foster parent

People sometimes ask us how hard it is to become a foster parent. Getting licensed to become foster parents was a time commitment and a whole hell of a lot of paperwork but it wasn’t difficult per se.

We first had to submit an initial application, which was reviewed to determine our basic eligibility. I think we had a phone interview? I don’t remember exactly because once Seth and I decided that we wanted to become foster parents we wanted to be foster parents right away. We didn’t want to wait. So once we submitted our application we were rather annoying with follow up calls and I can’t remember if there was an actual interview that we did or if we just harassed them a lot. Heh.

Once we passed that initial screening we moved on to taking classes, which were several hours in the evening one day a week for 11 weeks.

In the course of those classes we had to fill out a ream of paper worth of forms. I’m not actually exaggerating all that much. A literal half ream perhaps. It was insane. And all very important stuff.

They did background checks, and fingerprinting, and we had to list every address we had lived at in the last 30 years, which took some digging let me tell you. I didn’t remember my address from when I lived in England, or in college, and Seth didn’t remember any of his addresses except for his childhood home. I wound up digging through boxes of old letters to find what my address was when I was in college and studying abroad. The reason they asked for all those addresses was so that they could confirm there were no reports of child abuse or sexual abuse at any of those addresses. A couple of folks in my class said “oh this is easy, we’ve owned our home for 42 years!” Seth and I had pages and pages of addresses. Apparently we get around.

We filled out forms about what kinds of issues we would be accepting of. Would we take a child with severe autism? Developmental delays? A child who had a history of sexual abuse? Mental health diagnoses? A child who broke things? A child who had a history of killing animals? You name it, they asked it. Since Seth and I don’t have children of our own, we were able to check that we were willing to except a huge variety of behavioral issues. Where we drew the line was aggression against animals, since we had made a commitment to all of the pets we had adopted too. We have since refined our criteria, and would no longer take a child with severe autism because we understand some of our limits better. Our personal property we are fairly “meh” about. And some of it has indeed been broken by kids. Whatevs. It’s all replaceable.

We had to demonstrate what our finances are, and that we were able to support a child. We had to have a spare room with basic furnishings. We had to provide veterinary records for all of our zillion pets to prove that they were up-to-date on shots. I remember at one point providing our marriage certificate, but I think that was for the adoption paperwork rather than fostering paperwork – we completed both. We filled out a lot of forms asking things about what methods of discipline we would use and how we would handle different types of situations that might arise.

We had to convince someone to do a fire inspection of our home which was a pain in the neck. Our local fire department declined to do it, which left us relying on village officials, one of whom graciously agreed to do the inspection. But it took us a while to figure out how to get it done. We tried home inspectors, too, but they all wanted to charge us a ridiculous rate for a quick walk-through, so it was quite a relief when the village official agreed to do the walk-through for us.

Oh, because we have a wood burning stove, we had to have a chimney cleaning and inspection done too.

Ultimately once we completed the classes we had to have a home inspection done by someone at the agency. The home inspection is to make sure that things are clean and sanitary, and to check up on all of the safety requirements. We are required, for example, to have smoke detectors in every bedroom, and a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. We had to have an emergency escape plan posted in our house. We had to have a locking medicine cabinet. Cleaning products had to be stored safely with cabinet locks. This home inspection was done by our home finder, who is basically our social worker. She wanted to see the bedrooms and make sure that each one had a bed and a dresser and a closet.

Once we were certified, things got a whole lot easier. We still have home visits although at present because of Covid they are video chats rather than in person. Back when we had actual monthly home visits, Seth and I would always frantically clean and organize the house before the caseworker would arrive. We probably didn’t need to. We have been told before by caseworkers “you wouldn’t believe the things I see, you’re fine.” They come in and chat about the case for a little bit, and then ask to see the child’s room to make sure everything is fine there, and then they leave.

My favorite sign in our house, given to us by a friend who truly gets us.

Home visits are really not a big deal, though I always get anxious beforehand because our house is always just one chaos level away from pandemonium.

How do kids wind up in foster care?

This is a tough post to write because I need to be conscientious about privacy issues and can’t really tell the story about each of our foster kids. I’ll talk in some generalities though, because a friend raised the question, and I think this is a really important topic.

I think a lot of people assume that bio parents who have their kids removed are monsters. I’ll tell you right now that based on my experience they are absolutely not. The parents of our kids have all loved them more than I can express. They’ve all wanted the best for their kids. They just sometimes weren’t able to provide it.

Some kids wind up in foster care because of poverty and homelessness. One of our kids’ parents wound up homeless with the children because the apartment DSS emergency funds paid for was infested with bedbugs. It takes time and funds to straighten out messes like that, and the very poor don’t have resources to draw on. It just so happened that that parent also didn’t have parents to rely on. One parent was dead, one had severe mental health issues, so the parent had nowhere to go with kids in tow, and called CPS to surrender them to foster care temporarily to give the parent time to straighten out the mess. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.

Some parents wind up with their kids in foster care because they simply don’t know how to raise children. If they weren’t raised well themselves, they have no role models to draw upon, and are bound to make mistakes. Sometimes mistakes lead to children getting hurt. Sometimes mistakes lead to children not getting enough nutrition, or having rotted teeth.

Those of us who were raised in relatively functional families tend to take for granted that we know about things like nutrition, and weaning, and dental health, and hygiene. But some folks were never taught those things at home, and never learned those things in poor school systems, and simply don’t know how to provide proper care for their kids. This is one of those areas that gets me upset because preventative care, namely educational programs for vulnerable parents, could make a world of difference and prevent kids from winding up in foster care. We need to do better with identifying and providing resources to vulnerable parents.

Some kids wind up in foster care because they are caught up in a cycle of domestic violence between parents. Sometimes the abused parent can’t figure out how to leave with their children. Sometimes they’re so stuck in the cycle of violence they don’t know how to get even themselves out, let alone their kids.

Alcohol and drugs are a reason that many parents wind up losing their children to foster care. Addiction is a horrible beast, and clawing one’s way out of it is sometimes such a monumental task that people can’t do it, even for children they love.

Sometimes there are cultural barriers that play a role. This is especially the case with Tiny’s family, where families may have been refugees for generations, have grown up largely without formal schooling, don’t speak the language, and don’t understand our cultural expectations for medical care.

Foster care tends to be generational. More than one of our kids’ parents have spent time in foster care themselves. That means trauma is intergenerational. People live what they know, and if they grew up with domestic violence and poverty that may be all they think they are capable of living themselves. Mental health issues and PTSD are common among parents who have children in foster care. Just wanting a better life for your child doesn’t mean you know how to give it to them.

For medical kids, sometimes an accident or injury can lead to a child winding up in foster care because the medical care the child requires is more sophisticated than the parents can cope with.

A lot of teen parents wind up struggling to figure out how to cope with parenting while they are still children. One of our kids had a teen mom who grew up in a life saturated with trauma herself.

The school to prison pipeline leads to children not having parents who are able to care for them as well.

Kids with mental health problems and behavioral problems sometimes wind up in foster care because their parents can’t cope. There are insufficient resources for kids with mental health issues and behavioral issues, and sometimes parents reach limits they didn’t even know they had.

Are there some “bad” people out there whose kids are in foster care? I’m sure there are. Are there some folks who have made some terrible choices that led to their kids being in foster care? You bet. But on the whole we have found loving parents who want their kids to thrive and want to do right by them.

What happens while kids are in foster care is absolutely crucial. Parents are required to take steps to rectify the situation that led to the child being in foster care. This means that parents are required to get mental health services, drug and alcohol treatment, parenting classes, domestic violence classes, parent aids, and the like. Whatever the underlying issue is with the parent, they must learn to do better in order to get their children back.

For some of our kids, that has meant parents learning what resources they have upon which they can rely in times of crisis. For all of our kids, it has meant many months of extremely hard work by the parents. I am sincerely impressed by some of the parents who worked their tails off to get their kids back. And for the most part, kids have gone back to far better situations than they left. All those things that are required of bio parents really do work.

Are the situations that kids return to ideal? Nope, but neither is their staying with us. Being separated from a bio family equals trauma, whether it’s for short term or long term. Some very good studies have shown that kids tend to do better with their bio families than they do with ideal adoptive families, and those studies form the foundation of the foster care system. If kids can go home to a safe and appropriate situation, then they should. And if someone can’t accept that that is the truth, they’re going to have a very hard time being a foster parent.

Tiny’s Tale

Tiny’s transformation with us has been pretty amazing. When she came to us she was literally starving to death. She wasn’t eating or drinking, and at almost 2 years old she weighed only 15 lbs. We now believe she’s a Little Person which accounts for how small her frame is, but she was still so painfully thin it hurt to look at her.

It’s not the first time we’ve had painfully thin kids come to us for a good fattening up. The twins PB&J gained three pounds with us in the first month or so. But they hadn’t been starving, just not getting quite enough. Jelly had been painful to look at – those skinny legs! – but nothing like Tiny.

Tiny was literally starving. We now know that kids who are not fed enough food and given the necessary types of stimulation can become anorexic. They will start to refuse food and often they need to be intubated. I was damned if I was going to let this kid go to the hospital and get a G tube. One way or another we were going to get her eating.

She came to us on a Friday afternoon and we spent so much time that weekend on the phone with her pediatrician trying to come up with ideas for how to get her to take in Pediasure. She had been prescribed it but was refusing it. We tried every kind of bottle and sippy cup in the house. We tried spooning it into her. We eventually discovered a medical syringe could be used to shoot small amounts of it into her mouth, and she would swallow it. Hallelujah!

So, every hour we were syringing small amounts of pediasure into her. We started to get wet diapers again which meant her dehydration level wasn’t so dire. She started to perk up a little. But she still clung to me and refused to be put down or go to Seth for several more days. I dozed while holding her for those first few days – it was the only way to get her to sleep.

On about day 4 we finally forced the issue and I left her with Seth to cry it out while I got some proper sleep. She howled and raged about it, but eventually realized he wasn’t a monster. When I woke up and came downstairs, the two of them were actually giggling together. Giggling! That was the first sign for us that maybe things might turn out ok after all.

Tiny and Seth, being silly early on.

We worked our way through the pediasure dosing gradually giving her more at each sitting and managing to go 2 hours between feedings, then 2 1/2, then 3, and all the way up to 4 hours between feedings. Her little tummy had started to expand and she rapidly gained 3 lbs off of Pediasure.

Tiny Tiny

But she still wouldn’t really drink it on her own, and still wouldn’t eat real food. So how to tempt her?

Her medical records said that one time when she’d been hospitalized for failure to thrive she had initially refused hospital food, but began to eat when her Mama brought her Burmese food. Her Nurse Practitioner and I suspected that might be the key to getting her to eat – familiar food. So her NP talked to a friend who talked to another friend who runs a stall at a market selling Burmese food, and he donated us a massive Burmese meal, and her NP drove it out to our house. I’m still just flabbergasted that everyone involved would do that for her.

The amazing meal Tiny’s NP brought her. It even included durian! Tiny wouldn’t touch the durian, and I don’t blame her. I tried it but couldn’t get past the smell.

I wish I could show the video of her slurping the Burmese noodles that night. She ate a massive bowl of noodles, slucking them right down with apparent relish. Clearly there was something to this Burmese food thing. Seth and I tasted the food that had been brought and it was absolutely delicious – spicy and flavorful in ways US food just isn’t.

So I reached out to various friends for advice. I ordered cookbooks but they would take a number of days to be delivered. One friend sent me pages from her recipe book, Burma Superstar. So I got started with that right away.

My Burmese cookbooks

Some of the ingredients – things like ginger root, fresh cilantro, shallots, limes, and coconut milk – I could get at the local Wegmans. But some of the items, like dried shrimp powder, were more of a challenge. There’s a massive Asian grocery store on Erie Boulevard, so I tackled that for the lemongrass and noodles and whole fish that the recipes called for. It’s an overwhelming place and I know I haven’t discovered all its gems yet.

Burmese cooking for Tiny is a labor of love. It’s so time and labor intensive it’s kind of amazing. But my god are the dishes delicious! Whole constellations of flavor explode in your mouth with each bite. Admittedly some of the recipes we haven’t really thought were worth the effort. The recipe we have for Mohinga – which is sort of the signature dish of Myanmar – we don’t really like and it takes literal hours to prepare. But other recipes, especially the curries, are to die for.

Mohinga

I don’t cook Burmese food for Tiny nearly often enough because it’s so labor intensive and I’m not someone who really likes cooking even though I’m good at it. But when I do make it she slurps the soups and noodles and downs the rice and meats and gets all wiggly and happy about it. It’s so lovely to watch!

She now loves ice cream and chocolate sauce especially if there are sprinkles.

These days Tiny is thriving. She’s off Pediasure entirely and eats well at every meal. She’s almost 20 lbs and has a little belly and back fat and chubby cheeks and looks like a toddler should aside from how short she is. She wears 18 month clothing at 2 1/2! There is clearly a genetic issue holding her back when it comes to height, and hopefully her geneticist can unravel her mysterious stature for us. But she now eats well, including all the usual American foods most toddlers eat. She loves spaghetti, is a major carnivore and likes almost any kind of meat, and loves noodle soups which are close to her heart.

Short kid problems!

And honestly, she’s the smartest, spunkiest, funniest kid we’ve had. She’s adored through and through.

Do the parents know where we live?

Nope. Definitely not.

Even Kiddo’s mom, who has become a good friend and is welcome at our house literally any time, has only been coming to our house for about a year now. Until then she didn’t know where we lived.

Why? If we want to have good relationships with our kids’ parents, why wouldn’t we invite them over to see our home and gain a sense of security knowing their kids are in a nice place?

Well, safety. Safety of us, safety of our kids. Twice now we have had bio parents make threats against us. One made an indirect threat on FB (the parent was not smart enough to make their page private first), and one made a threat against us in a hallway of a courthouse. Strangers having your kids is an emotionally charged thing and people have been known to fly off the handle about it. Just today in the news there’s a story about an Amber Alert in Rochester because someone broke into a foster home and abducted two children. That’s freaking horrifying, and my worst nightmare.

Additionally, we want our home to be as trauma trigger free as possible for our kids. As much as our kids love their parents, very often their parents are associated with traumatic incidents from their past, even if it’s just the removal from their parents and placement in foster care. Our kids need a safe place to be, and they need to feel a sense of relief when they arrive at our house each day knowing that they don’t have to expect family members to complicate things for them.

It’s one of my pet peeves that many medical facilities will read back my address to me when I check a child in for an appointment. If a bio parent is at the appointment with me, I don’t want my address read back aloud. But it’s happened, and it’s unfortunate. I wish medical facilities had training to be more discreet when kids are in foster care.

Once kids have gone home we use our discretion to determine when the time might be right, if ever, for a parent to come over. So far it’s only happened with Kiddo’s mom. Tiny’s family might become another exception. They’re lovely people.

I know other foster families who have had different philosophies about it. One of my friends had two different families knowing where she lived, and she would invite them for things like birthday parties for the kids. It never became an issue and worked well for her. But I’m a bit of a nervous Nellie I guess, and news like today’s heartbreaking article about the abducted children doesn’t help me feel less anxious about the idea of parents knowing where we live. I’ll continue to keep it secret from bio families as much as possible.

Handy Kids

Our house is old – 190 years old to be precise. And it’s a work in progress still after 13 years of owning and working on it.

When we bought the house we got it off foreclosure. It had been empty for a few years, had burst pipes, and feral cats. One was dead in the basement, and we found muddy cat prints in the attic. They had clearly spent time peeing on the carpeting throughout the house.

You’d have thought the first thing we’d do was tear out the carpeting, but the mortgage lender required us to rebuild the front porch first, which was termite dust held together with green paint. So that’s what we did. We spent the summer with the porch roof on supports and redid everything below it.

In 13 years Seth has put in new flooring throughout much of the first and second floors, we had a patio and walkway poured, Seth and his father built new back stairs, Seth put in a new wood burning fireplace insert and rebuilt the fireplace box, rebuilt the stair railings, and fixed a lot of wiring and lighting. Now we are in the midst of a full bathroom gut and renovation. Down to the studs and joists. Seth is *amazing* at all renovations and repairs.

Watch out, he’s got a torch!

Our projects are always reaaaaally something. The people who owned the house in the 1990s took out most of the lath and plaster and put in new wiring and windows, for which I am grateful. But they cut a lot of corners, and we always have to take things down to studs and joists and fix all their mistakes before we can get to installing new materials. We have found areas of flooring that were spongy feeling because there was essentially nothing supporting them. The old fireplace insert was teetering on the brink of falling into the basement because there was no floor under the back half of it. You can’t trust that the circuit breakers contain any logical collection of outlets and lights. The floor in the upstairs hallway was a full 4 inches higher on one side than the other so it was at a crazy drunken angle. And so on.

Basically, we are always working on something on the house and it’s always an adventure.

Naturally, because we are us, we get our kids involved in the projects. Kiddo in particular loves power tools and is really good with them because of all the time she’s spent helping Seth on projects.

I think this was Kiddo’s very first encounter with tools. Need to get matchbox cars out from under the dishwasher? Give the kid a screwdriver and let her help take the front off it and fish around underneath!
We would buy little wood toy kits from Lowes and Home Depot and teach Kiddo how to put them together. This was her intro to the hammer.
Kiddo did legitimate work on the floor in the back room! She was good with those pry bars and learned how to take out her anger at life with power tools like screw drivers.
Assembling the canopy on the back patio.

We want our kids to have diverse life experiences and skills. It’s so good for Kiddo in particular – who struggles with self esteem – to know that she has a variety of skills.

Tiny “assisting” Seth with a wheelbarrow

Even Tiny has gotten in on the action. Small as she is, and only two and a half, she can hold her own with a small impact driver – she helped us put together our Little Free Library – and the amazing thing is that Seth didn’t even have to teach her how to use it. She just figured it out from watching Seth. I so wish I had photos of her in action, but I’m the photographer in the family – and alas, Seth didn’t think to capture it. Next time though!

Our Little Free Library that we built with scraps from the house, plus a few contributions from neighbors and family members.

Reactions to “I’m a foster parent”

To say the least, we have gotten a wide variety of reactions from people about our being foster parents. For the most part we have been very lucky – our friends and family have supported us.

That’s not always the case. One friend of ours who has her own biological son and also fostered for a while, was constantly begging certain family members not to shower gifts and praise and attention on her bio son and ignore her foster son because it made her foster son – who was about 6 at the time and keenly aware of the discrepancy – feel awful. Thank heavens we haven’t been put in that position.

It helps, no doubt, that we don’t have bio kids and the only grandchild on my side of the family is my 15 year old niece who dotes on our foster kids and is insanely good with them even when their various behaviors emerge. My sister has bought our kids adorable expensive clothes and toys, my father has bought them toys, and my mother has knit them sweaters and hats and made them teddy bears. My family has supported us through the ups and downs of foster parenting, and graciously refrained from being critical about our decision not to have our own biological kids.

My work colleagues at my law firm were a mixed bag. Some were wonderfully supportive even when baffled as to why we would want to get involved in a broken foster care system and have our hearts ripped out when kids go home. Others treated me strangely, and very differently from my colleagues who had bio kids. I always felt like an outsider among firm higher ups once we began fostering because some people just didn’t know what to make of us.

I clearly remember one professional dinner I attended where I relayed the story of how Gronckle stopped breathing one night when he had croup, and we had to call 911 to get him to the hospital in an ambulance, and the kid scared the pants off us and the EMT by intermittently stopping breathing at regular intervals all the way to the hospital. The reaction from the folks at the table was casual disinterest. After the dinner I talked with one of my colleagues who was at the table and who is a good friend, and she was shocked that the general reaction was so tepid. It just struck her as strange. I was so grateful she told me she felt the reaction was odd because it was very validating. I’m the type of person who internalizes everything and I was sure my dismay was unfounded until she reassured me it was not.

Oh well. I’m ok with some folks not understanding me, especially now that I no longer work there.

I already wrote about Seth’s evil boss who apparently thought he should let Mouse die rather than take her to the ER in the middle of a work day. He was a real charmer. My experiences clearly could have been far worse!

A few folks have been skin-crawlingly awkward about our being foster parents. One of my former work colleagues used to refer to our kids as our “critters,” and told me, in a condescending tone, at least once a week that I’m an angel and am going directly to heaven. I never knew what to say in response other than to smile weakly. Seth has had some folks tell him he’s an angel and it doesn’t bother him at all, so maybe it’s just bothersome to me because I know I’m not angelic. Just ask Seth. 😂

There is, however, one reaction that Seth and I both get regularly that makes us both cringe. It’s so common for people to learn we are foster parents and then exclaim, “I don’t know how you do it. *I* couldn’t do it. I’d get too attached.” Giving people the benefit of the doubt, perhaps what they really mean is “You must be stronger than I am.” But if that’s what they mean, I wish they would say that instead. Because every time I hear “I’d get too attached” what my heart hears is “You must be a cold fish if you can just let kids go.” I know I’m not the only one who is bothered by that phrase because my second favorite sweatshirt is this:

If you love this you can get your own! I found it in an Etsy shop called “The Foster Mom.”

My absolute favorite sweatshirt says “My favorite season is the fall… of the patriarchy.”

I apparently have a thing for snarky hoodies.

Staying Connected as Spouses and Co-Parents

This is another post responding to a question from a friend. How do Seth and I stay connected through all the craziness of foster care? Do we have date nights?

Answer to the latter question first: no, damnit, not since Covid started. Before that? Rarely. And lordie do we need dates! What I wouldn’t do for a dinner where no one complains that anything is “disgusting” and the conversation is that of adults only! Or a night at the race track, vroom vroom! Siiiigh. Those nights will happen again, someday.

Truthfully we have had a super easy and super hard time with babysitters. We have two sets of neighbors who have babysat for us for free multiple times and I always feel so guilty! They’re amazing. We are blessed with our neighbors generally these days. One of those neighbors has an 11 year old daughter who dotes on Tiny and has even been known to ask to borrow her in the afternoon for a few hours of fun. The other neighbor has a son who dotes on Tiny too. Both the boy and girl neighbors have bought gifts for Tiny and Kiddo which is just about the sweetest thing ever.

Paid babysitters have been harder to find though we finally have yet another neighbor who is babysitting age now. Until recently the county required all babysitters to be 18 years of age or older. Now with the new “prudent parenting” standard I think we can go a little younger which opens up some possibilities. The high school girl across the street managed to wrangle the twins into naps when she babysat them so I have great faith in her abilities to manage whatever kids can dole out. So maybe once Covid is better managed as the vaccine starts circulating more we will have some babysitters I won’t feel so guilty about burdening with our kids.

So, absent date nights, how do Seth and I stay connected? Hard work, good chemistry, and shared goals. A lot of therapy. A lot of talking through things. We could undoubtedly do better but we do pretty well.

We talk a lot, including sometimes in front of the kids. I swear it’s important for adults to talk about life things in front of kids. It’s good to model healthy conflict resolution and negotiation.

Like most couples, our biggest disagreements are typically about household chores. Blech. We both hate them so our house gets messy which stresses us out. We’ve gone through some major purges of stuff lately which has helped, and are working on making sure all things have a place where they belong. Covid quarantine was great for that – we were so bored we cleaned. We have to be really bored or really panicked about a visitor coming to deep clean, apparently.

When it comes to taking kids, two of our biggest disagreements ever came from me wanting to take a child and Seth not wanting to. He wanted down time after Gronckle left. I wanted another kid to help fill the aching void in my heart and give me something to keep me busy and keep my mind off the pain. We struggled big time with how long to wait before another child came. Then I got a call from placement and made Seth call them back because I was tired of saying “no,” and he surprised me by saying “yes” to Mouse. In retrospect we took exactly the right amount of time off because we needed Mouse. We’ve also disagreed over taking this teen with my bleeding heart wanting to take her and his wanting to protect Kiddo from disruption from her old room. Kiddo solved that disagreement by agreeing to move in with Tiny, bless her.

Seth and I both have therapists, which is hugely important. I’ve been seeing my therapist for something like six years now, and Seth has been seeing his for perhaps six months, and he had another one before. We both love our therapists and are well matched. Having therapists allows us to blow off steam by complaining to a neutral third-party, and getting a reasonableness check back. It helps me figure out how to talk with Seth about certain issues. It also helps us just cope with all the stuff that’s going on for us, even if it’s not related to our relationship per se. It helps keep us feeling stable and well grounded. We have gone to a therapist together a couple of times before and that was really helpful as well. And we make a point of talking with each other about what we are working on in therapy, which means we have really meaningful conversations with each other on a regular basis, no matter how busy we are.

We each have our patterns that get us in trouble sometimes. But on the whole, having kids we both love has drawn us together. I love watching Seth parent. He’s silly and goofy and playful with kids, but also sensitive and has learned to have hard conversations with Kiddo that end in hugs and better understanding. We talk about behavioral issues, and work together to try to understand and handle them. And we share our frustrations with “the system” with each other which is validating.

I think I got insanely lucky when I met Seth. I think he’s a big part of the magic that keeps us going. He’s kind and sensitive and smart. He’s an amazing parent. He’s giving to a fault. He’s handy with house and cars. He’s willing to go to a therapist and isn’t machismo about anything. He has good friends, which I’ve discovered is really important for the health of our relationship because it’s healthy for him. And he’s hot. That totally helps too. 🙂

Amazon Registry

After some major futzing around on Amazon and getting myself wildly confused (oh Amazon, I have such a love/hate relationship with you), and after input from multiple friends who are smarter than I am, I have set up an Amazon registry for stuff we need to transition Kiddo into Tiny’s room and set up Kiddo’s old room for a teenager.

Voila! Here it is!

Y’all who are regular readers, and give me such great feedback, and those of you who have asked for an Amazon wish list so you can help out? Yeah. You all rock. Thank you!