The Waiting Game

The Liles family is on another adventure in life. We are in the process of becoming licensed to be foster to adopt parents. Through my school, I have learned about a group of siblings that are in foster care with the possibility of adoption. We have agreed to take all three children. At this point, the children are not "legally free" for adoption. That means that the parental rights have not been terminated. However, they are in a group home and need to be placed in a home until the decision is made one way or another.

The licensing process has gone pretty quickly. We found out in mid March about the change of plan for the children. We have done everything we are required to do: physicals, 2 classes, paper work, fire inspection, DHEC inspection, fingerprints, and the list goes on. We are now waiting for an inspector to come to a home study and write up an biography about our family. We also have hit another snag....

We have not lived in SC for five year, so DSS has to go back to our previous state for a background check. Wouldn't you know...NC has some kind of crazy law on their books that will not allow them to release that information to another agency in another state. They are the only state like that. We were told in the beginning that it would be atleast October before the rule was overturned. We decided to take matters into our own hands. Eric drove to our home county in NC and paid for a criminal background check. He then went to DSS there and they did a sexual offender background check for him. Both places put the paperwork in sealed envelopes and signed on the back like a transcript. We were told on Tuesday that everything was good and that our DSS was going to go ahead with everything. Then....on Friday we found out that the DSS check was not for the entire state of NC. Our case worker is checking with someone(?) to see if that is enough information. That then put a delay in sending out the case inspector to do the home study.

We also found out that we have to have more documentation from our doctors about some of our medical history. That won't be hard to obtain. We are just frustrated because he already answered the questions on our medical history forms. Oh well...we'll jump the hoop.

Rebecca is constantly asking us why we are having to do all of this and we don't have to do it to parent her. She is so right. If the parents of children in foster care had to do all we are having to do to get their children back, we would have a lot more children in the foster care system. We learned the hard way in NC that the system is not about the children. It's about giving the parents chance after chance. By doing that, these children stay in foster care until they are too old and people don't want to adopt them. It's sad.

We went yesterday and bought bunk beds for the girls. I found them on Craig's list for a really good deal. Now we just have to wait for the final word. I'm not very good at waiting. : )