Our Story So Far

Hi, my name is Rebecca and this is a special blog dedicated to our journey to become parents of a very special little boy with Cerebral Palsy. Our journey began way before this little boy was born, when we decided as a family that we would like to provide foster care for medically fragile infants. We went through months of training, interviews, hundreds of pages of paperwork, references, physicals etc. Only to find out that because our children were so young and close together at the time that it would be a few years before we were able to take any placements, plus we needed to make some expensive modifications to our home, so we put things on hold for a while. Fast forward a couple years to 2011, all of our kids Ethan (9), Helen (8), Mark (7) and Chloe (6) are all now in school and we can make the modifications needed to pass the life safety inspection (our biggest hurdle was a second pool fence that was needed because we have a door and a bedroom window that open into our pool area). We attend a new orientation and begin the process of certification again....happy that our many weeks of training are still good and we just have to wait for intake appointments and the home study inspection. In the mean time, I heard a story about a little boy an out of state agency is trying to place for adoption. This little boy was born early this year at just 31 weeks gestation and suffered a severe bleed in his brain, leaving his future very uncertain, with the likely hood of severe spastic quad CP. Knowing we were still weeks maybe months away from even having our foster care home study done I tried not to think about this little boy....but I kept thinking about him, and thinking about the fact that we have so much experience with CP, and all that is involved, and thinking about the difficulty this agency would have finding a home for this little boy, let alone a home with knowledge of this condition....a home that is already adapted, tailor made for what this child would need because we already have a child with these same needs. So I talked to my husband about this little boy, and adoption....and finally I contacted the agency about this baby, explained our situation that we were not yet home-study ready, but in the process and that we could provide a loving and nurturing home for this child. Well, they were interested. So now we are faced with the real possibility....the hope that we will be chosen to be the family for this little boy. It is both very exciting, and a little daunting. I have been frantically trying to get the money together so we will be ready to adopt this child if we are chosen, and trying not to get too attached to him (impossible) if we are not chosen and accepting that if he is not meant to be our child that there certainly is another child out there waiting for us to find him (or her). We are hoping to talk to the agency and get an update on the little guy tomorrow our Wednesday, and have an appointment in another week with our agency so hopefully we can get our home-study to cover both the foster care and hopefully the adoption of this very special little boy!