Challah bread, Foster #5, and Homestudy Interview #2

My goodness! I'm so glad to be nearly caught up with blogging.  Here's some pictures from a bread project:  Challah with raisins



The rising dough...

 The next day, I rolled out a hand full and added raisins.

Coiled it up and let it rest.  Then I  painted it with an egg mix and sprinkled it with sesame seeds.

 And baked it!  It turned out quite yummy!



 Lesson 5 was on the subject of strengthening family relationships.

This is something those raised in a healthy family take for granted.   Growing up in a healthy family provides children with a sense of identity, history, and cultural values.   It provides a sense of self esteem.   Your cultural identity includes your values, routines, communication patterns, religious beliefs, foods, how life celebrated and honored.  Part of your cultural identity also includes racial identity.  As a foster parent you try to instill in your foster kiddo that they (and the culture they come from) are valuable members of society with the same rights and entitlements as everybody else.  You try to dispel stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination.   This is a big challenge for foster kids, because your house is probably going to be different culturally.  Probably the best way to help the kiddos respect their own cultural identity and instill confidence and a good sense of self esteem...is to support the bio-family.  Send them pictures, ask the bio-parents for advice, support visits etc.  Another important part is making a "lifebook" for the children.  I'm all over this lifebook thing.  A lifebook is a scrapbook sort of thing that covers the family history of the children.  It basically includes as much information as we can gather for the children.  The book belongs to the child so it can travel with them as they go from foster parents to bioparents/adoptive parents.  It sort of provides a map of where they've been and their story.  It can be as fancy as you want it to be.  Anyway...I'd love to put my scrapbooking skills to use to help a kiddo connect to their past.



Homestudy Interview #2

  This interview lasted 3 hours and we sat at our dinner table with our licensing/placement specialist over a cup of coffee (and some bread) and discussed our support network, drew out our "ecomap," and discussed our discipline styles.  We don't really know how we're going to discipline...since we've never had kids before!  Our specialist recommended reading Love and Logic for some discipline ideas.  A friend let us borrow his audio version of the book and Chase and I have been listening through it.  I have to say some of the techniques are not going to fly at all in my house.  For example...the author mentioned rehoming a dog because the children weren't feeding it and it was losing weight.  UNACCEPTABLE!!!  NO!!!  You cannot torture a living creature to teach a lesson.  For goodness sake...rehome the dog before it suffers.  I hope I just misunderstood that part.  Another part that really bothered me was the "Uh Oh Song"  It just sounded sarcastic to me...and you can't lock a child in his room.  That's illegal for foster children...  Just saying.  Other than those little points there are some good tid bits in the book.  I like the basic concept of you have to let children make choices and not always swooping them in to save them from natural consequences.


Peace and Love, y'all