Waiting for them...

The left side of the "kid's room"

The right side of the "kid's room"

Robert and I have made the decision to be foster parents with the intention to eventually adopt. What this means is rather than applying to adopt children who have already been in foster homes and who are now "legally free" for adoption, we are going to be a foster home for children who may (or may not) end up available to be adopted. There are several reasons we have chosen to go this route. The first reason is that we thought we could do both (foster parent and be on the list to adopt as a general applicant), but were informed that we could only do one or the other. The second reason is since the children we will be adopting are usually not infants and have special emotional needs, they prefer to adopt children out to parents with experience with these types of children - most of which can be gained from caring for other children with special needs by foster parenting. The third reason for foster parenting is that should we have a child in our home for 6 months, and should that child come up for adoption, we would be given the first chance to adopt that child (given no other biological family members show up to adopt them). And our final reason for choosing foster parenting is we want to help as many children as we can whether we have them for one week, one month, one year, or forever! I spoke with our caseworker last week, and she is hoping to do our home study by the end of this week - although they are currently short a person and way overloaded so please pray they will find time to fit us in! Once our homestudy has been completed, they could place a child (or children) with us at any time! Since we don't know if we will be receiving a baby or a school-aged child, we have tried to prepare a room that will be ready for any age! We already had some baby stuff that had been given to us from friends, and this weekend we bought bunkbeds! Now we just have to be patient while we wait for God to bring us some little ones...