1st Class - Check

First Class was yesterday. Very long. it turns out that there are 2 classes a week. And, the last two lessons are on the same day. What does that mean? It means that instead of 8/9 weeks of classes, it is only 4 weeks of class.

Our classes will be over before Thanksgiving.

The class had 8 families - many different situations. We went around the room and had to say what type of care we were doing and our names, etc.

1 - Us. It was totally totally strange to say, "hello, we are ...., we can't have our own children" I guess saying it out loud makes it even more true.

2 - trying to get legal custody of a niece's infant. Placement in their house since 2 weeks old. Goal is reunification.

3 - doing foster care only. I guess they "sponsor" international kids and want to help kids here. Unsure if they would adopt if situation presented itself. Children up to 12 yrs old.

4 - doing foster care only. Have 6 kids between the two of them, but most have left the house. Miss children in the home. Not looking to adopt - only foster. Children up to 10 years old.

5 - trying to get legal custody of cousin's 2 kids. Placement in their house for a few days. Will adopt if cousin does not shape up.

6 - looking to get her 2 grandchildren out of foster care. Children removed 2 months ago, but are not with her now. Goal is permanent placement with her.

7 - looking to get legal custody of her grandchildren. Don't know the rest of her story.

8 - Adoption. She also can not have children. Adopted a child 8 years ago through the system (but was considered a private adoption - I guess it is a long story), then a few years later got a call about a sibling. Private adoption of that one also. A week ago, she got a call from another state's child agency. There is now another sibling that was removed. She is going to adopt this sibling but must go through all the training, since in the past she was not officially licensed through the state.

We do not have a resource worker yet, but the trainer said that by the end of classes we should have one assigned to us. I am trying not to stress over that.

The class was fine, the guy jumped around a lot though. Seemed like he lost his train of thought through out the whole class. We watched a foster care / adoption video that was (no joke) from about 1990.

You know it is bad when the statistics are from the 80's. The situations were pretty unlikely and the acting was BAD!

After the video, we talked about different things and had open discussions.

During a break I asked one of the staff about our situation. Meaning that our goal is adoption and asked if there were kids whose were already "free" for adoption. Of course there are, but 99% of them are older kids. So, it looks like we will be doing fost/adopt. Which of course is fine, but that comes with the legal risk that the children may return to the parents. I guess that is a the chance we will have to take.

But, the trainer also was giving us realistic expectations that a lot of these kids do NOT go back. I guess we will just have to look at each situation as it is presented to us and make a decision based on the info.