As many of you know, the worst part about our move to Texas was that our foster sons had to be moved to a new foster home.  It’s was highly emotional for all of us and quite honestly, it’s taken months for us to come to grips with those emotions.

The boys seem to be doing well in their new foster home and I am thankful for that.  It doesn’t dismiss the fact that we still miss them and wish things would have turned out differently for all of us, but sometimes life has other plans.

One thing we’ve learned through our adoption and fostering experiences, is that closing your heart to the most vulnerable in this world, is not something one can easily do.  Once you’ve travelled down this path, it becomes a part of who you are.  As such, we began to discuss whether or not is made sense for our family to pursue fostering here in Texas.

Hubby and I began discussing it after Lili expressed her deep sadness over missing the boys.  While we recognized that she very much enjoyed having little brothers, we didn’t realize how deeply she enjoyed being an older sister.  We knew how Naomi felt because she had been very good about sharing her feelings all along, so hearing Lili talk so emotionally about her feelings made us realize that we needed to at least consider fostering again as a possibility.

Finally, we made our decision and decided to move forward.

While we’re not in complete agreement on all the details, at the very least we are in agreement that we want to get our foster care license in Texas.  We have a cruise coming up in February and it doesn’t make sense to bring foster children into our home until after the cruise.  In the meantime, what we would like to do is open our home as respite providers for other foster families until we feel we’re ready to make the leap back into full-time foster care.

Foster care in the State of Texas is different that it was in Illinois.  Not completely different, but Texas does seem to micromanage their foster homes.  The team who oversees foster children is much larger in Texas than it was in Illinois.  After all, everything is bigger in Texas, right?!  The licensing process is more complicated.  The list goes on, but the one thing that doesn’t change is the need for more foster homes.  Texas has a shortage of foster parents and the need is high.

So we were unable to close our hearts and are jumping back on the foster care ship again.  Let’s hope the waters aren’t too rough.