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

Foster Class #4 and Homestudy

I’ve learned so much from just starting this process of getting licensed to foster children.  I think that even before our first placement…we’ve been challenged and our hearts stretched to hold a little more love.   I’m still a little behind on blogging about the classes…so maybe I’ll try to catch up today.  Chase (bless him) has taken over cooking dinner.  My made from scratch turban shaped challah bread (with raisins) is in the oven.  It’s looking delicious.  I’ll post a picture of it if it’s done before I finish this post. 

Let’s do some catch-up on our foster process…

Foster Class 4:  Grief and loss

 Lesson 4 was all about loss and the children’s (or really anyone’s) response.  The children that enter foster care have experienced more loss than most children (and even most adults).  This can include a loss of self-esteem, significant people, health… We talked about the pathway through the grieving process (Loss, Shock/Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Understanding, Coping, Managing Loss).  These can be experienced simultaneously or in any order.  No matter what sort of situation the children come from, chances are the love their bioparents and didn’t want to leave.  So being forcibly removed from their loved ones and placed in the home of a stranger is a significant loss on many levels.   It’s normal for the children to react to this loss.   Foster parents (ie, the strangers) are expected to help the children react to their many losses and teach them socially acceptable ways of expressing those very heavy feelings.    Sometimes while we help the children deal with losses, our own losses will come to mind.   We also discussed developmental grieving…that is that you revisit grief again as we develop more coping skills or perspective.  Here’s an example of that in my life.  As a veterinarian, I periodically diagnose lymphoma in dogs.  Every time, I not only grieve for that family that just got the news their dog has terminal cancer but I reprocess the grief of losing my beloved childhood pet, Corky.  I keep a picture of that rotten little dog on my desk, and I’ll never forget.  That is an example of developmental grieving.    The children will go through this as well.  It may seem that they are doing well and forgetting their pain…then suddenly they will become angry or sad again. 

Life is such a beautiful, wonderful…sometimes bittersweet thing.  I really hope we can help the kiddos.  In class the instructors said we can help by showing that we care about the children’s feelings (24/7), providing for the children’s needs, showing the children how to express their needs and that their needs will be met, and demonstrate that there are adults in the world that can be trusted. 

Anyway as a foster parent you serve as a “loss manager,” and in many ways I feel like this a skill I use at work regularly.   I help people grieve for their pets when our beloved pets suffer disease and die.  I grieve for my patients and my clients too.  I really take their suffering to heart and I work to make the passing of pet as peaceful as possible.

Homestudy Interview #1

Following lesson 4 we had our first interview as part of the home study (FYI the first interview was sort of a pre-homestudy, pre-class interview).    We talked a lot about grief and the losses Chase and I experienced throughout our lives.  This was a fairly intense interview just because of the subject matter.  I was apparently very pensive at work the following day.    We also talked about some of the issues our families have historically struggled with.  We talked about the effect Chase’s work has had on him etc.   Overall I’d say the interview went really well even though the subject matter was a little intense.