Well it was a fun ride, but we have closed our house to fostering. The foster care system in this country is very broken. It isn’t fair to biological families, it is not fair to foster parents, and it is created to damage children as much as possible. Anyone involved with children in care, should ALWAYS have the first thought of do no harm. This means that they should be doing everything they can do, to not inflect any more trauma on the child then is ABSOLUTELY necessary. After 7 years of fostering, I can say without a doubt, that this is not the case.
We are not going to look back though. I still feel I can not talk about our fostering experience freely. Maybe in a year or so I will come back to this issue but right now I don’t feel that I can “put it out there”. I can say that I have been working to try to get legislation passed in my state to try to make things better. This is a very slow process but I am hopeful that day will occur. I also know what I will work on after that as the whole experience of fostering has shown me a different world then the one I had been in for all of my years prior to fostering. So that would be one of my biggest take a ways from this experience.
Now on to what we are doing now. Well we are in the middle of a massive kitchen remodel. We have gutted our kitchen down to the drywall (though in some spots down to the studs). We have worked with a kitchen designer to come up with a plan that is ironic as its bones are what we started with. We will have our sink, refrigerator, and pantry in the same spots that this house was designed for. The stove will move to make better use of space.
If you don’t know or remember, our kitchen used to be a kitchen from 1950. It was suppose to be eat in. Perhaps it was in 1950. With our modern life though, it became a cluttered mess. We tried over the years to help it. We initially started with kitchen carts. They failed over the years so we got rid of them. Then we did a minor remodel. We removed the dirty (and could never get cleaned) pantry, moved the refrigerator to a corner of the room to make a HUGE (by my kitchen standards) pantry. We added cabinets to the walls, and a countertop to house our large air fryer/toaster/oven. This worked for a bit, but then we needed more space so I put in a rolling cart in our pantry. Then we had a differently abled child who HAD to eat in the kitchen so we put in a dining room table. Then we lost that child and had a teen that needed food separate from us as we are vegan and put in a small bookshelf for her food. Then… we barely had room for any of us in the kitchen. Nothing was working. And all of this says nothing for the floor which over the years did not get better. It got worse. Even Amelia, our dog, started eating the tiles that were coming up. She is a pretty thing but not the smartest! This is our “before” with our kitchen. It was taken earlier this year before I realized that I would get a new kitchen this year… so it is really like how it really was.
Over the last month we have moved EVERYTHING out of our kitchen. That is a feat in and of itself. Trust me it wasn’t easy! We have stuff in the “foster” room. We have most of our food in our living room. We have a few items in the basement and our kitchen is now in our bedroom and our entryway. This has made it so we could take out soffits, cabinets, moldings, and floor. I really never understood soffits. I mean, they are a box for no reason. Maybe it is because we live in a small house, but I have yet to go into a house where someone says “I have too much storage!!” Maybe I don’t know the right people.
As you can see, the kitchen has a new kind of mess. It works though. The floor is all gone. All linoleum, 1/4 plywood, linoleum, and peel and stick tile of it! The subfloor is about 1/2 lower then our floor was! The plumber has been out one time and did some stuff. We now don’t have a gas line going into our kitchen. We are going to induction for cooking. We have a lot for an electrician to do but we are waiting on permits. Hopefully I will get the call this week saying that it was ready to be scheduled!
We have started drywalling. I would show a photo but much like you never want to see the sausage being made, it is probably best for me to leave that for a bit. We still have a bit more work to do on our walls (and yes we know that outlets need to be moved and put in, we are just trying to fix what we can to have less work later). Our goal is to prime the walls then we can go on to tiling the floor. We have been saving cardboard for the floor for after it is tiled.
In other news, now that we are not fostering anymore, we are now going to adopt. I know, that was the hope that one day we would be called to do that WHILE fostering, and yes we were called, but the state hung up on us (to stretch that metaphor out too far). Now we are going through an agency. We can post our progress (right now we are in homestudy process) but we likely can not talk about the child until after the adoption is finalized. So you may see a photo of us with a face blocked out or something. The boys really are looking forward to having someone to call their sister and we are looking forward to that as well. The child will likely not be an infant, but an older child from the US.
Here are some photos of the boys from the last time I wrote on here:
