This is quite belated, but I really enjoyed putting together my photo essay for 2020, so I decided it was time to do another year in review with pics.
You will see that several of these are professional-quality photos, if I do say so myself, and several look like I have never held a camera before. Most are somewhere in between. And I feel like that is a perfect representation of our life last year.
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Every foster parent hears this comment at some point, often from very well-meaning acquaintances:
“I’ve totally thought about being a foster parent too!… But I’d get too attached and the kid might leave.”
*Massive internal sigh.*
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Well, four months somehow blew right by me since my last post. Not a strong start to the year with my goal of writing at least once a month, but here we are.
Full disclosure: our family life has been a hot mess – sometimes in a fun and energizing way, other times in a depressing and exhausting way. I offer the following as honest examples of what we’ve been wrestling with. All of this has gone down since the last time I posted (and this is far from a comprehensive list):
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I wrote this almost four years ago, when we found out that we were likely to be adopting C from foster care. You can see all of my posts about foster care and adoption here.
We completed a second adoption from foster care a few months ago – and November is National Adoption month! – so it seemed like a good time to share this publicly. We didn’t include any photos in that original letter, but I have included some here just for fun.
If you are working on your own adoption announcement, feel free to use any of this that applies to you …
One of the many complexities of being foster parents is that we have to get written permission from the Department of Child Services to leave our state with our foster kids, and we have to get written permission from a judge to leave the country.
For a couple that once considered themselves to be travel-savvy globe-trotters, this restriction has been a bit of a challenge. In the years between when we started dating and when we started fostering infants, our airplane adventures looked something like this: …
This is a topic I get asked about often, so I wanted to share this interview that I did in 2016. I have revised and updated it here. These pictures are all the real deal from our family travels, so forgive the blurriness, pixelation, and/or general low quality that you’ll see in some of them. That’s just cracker crumbs and sunscreen on the camera lens.
When I was little, my parents were very insistent about all of their kids trying new things and seeing new places. Sometimes that meant camping (usually in the rain) near our home in Washington, sometimes it meant trips across the country by train or plane to see family. As we kids got older, it included more difficult backpacking, biking, and skiing trips and then international travel and things like scuba diving and riding camels. …
I am very excited and proud to present the following guest post. Zella Kintsugi is the biological mother of three, the adoptive mother of two, and the foster mother of two. She and her husband have been involved with foster care and adoption since 2014.
I do not have it all figured out. I lose my temper. I use words I should not at times that are likely not appropriate. I am not kind, loving, and generous in every situation in which I find myself. …
I totally get it. You want to ask about our foster/adoptive family, but you’re not sure how. You’re not sure what the appropriate terms are for whatever is going on. Or if you’re allowed to ask if we couldn’t get pregnant and tried a bunch of fertility treatment and this is the fallout of that not working. Or if you can ask about the money involved. Or the race of the kids. Or where they came from. Or whether I’ll give you vague and semi-patronizing answers that will make you wish you’d kept your questions to yourself.
We are big believers in honesty and we love it when people show interest in our family and ask us questions about foster care and adoption. So below are some Q & A about our experience – with questions we’ve been asked before and questions I suspect you want to ask because I always wanted to ask tons of questions when I met foster/adoptive parents before I was one of them. I’ve done my best to answer these in the most straightforward and honest way possible. …
I recently got some unsolicited and fairly angry advice from another adoptive mom to the effect of the following (the actual lecture I got was much longer than this – I have distilled it down to the main points for your convenience): …
Like many things in life, there are a whole bunch of reasons you might choose to do this. There are also a whole bunch of reasons not to. These are just the factors that led us in to this adventure a little over three years ago. …