Resolution

Court happened and Niblet's dad got full custody. Yay for Niblet and her dad!
We're even pretty relieved for everything to be over. No more "what-ifs". No more county f'ing everything up. Even the lawyer called her dad a "rare commodity" because he stepped up and did what he had to do.

We had Niblet for one day this weekend and she seemed really fine. She was happy to see us when we picked her up, but not super-clingy or anything. We get the impression that she still thinks of us as her primary parents, even though we only see her once a week. She doesn't mind being with him, but I suspect that she thinks of him more like daycare - eventually we'll come get her again.

He made a point of making sure we have his number and said we can take her whenever we want, so we're glad for that. We'll see her at least once a week for a while and then maybe regularly, or maybe just occasionally. We could take her for a weekend, or just go to the park one afternoon or something. I'm looking forward to seeing out it all pans out. Really, we could probably take her camping with us next summer, if we wanted to. As fostermama has said, it's kind of like being non-custodial parents. We didn't have a divorce or anything, but as far as Niblet's concerned, we are her parents, too, and she'll be happy to spend time with us!

Now we're on hiatus. No foster babies for a while. We're off the list.
We're signed up with our domestic private adoption agency, but we're not accepting a match where the baby would be due before mid-December or so. We need some time for ourselves.

I wish I could post a picture of Niblet for you guys. She's so freakin' cute. And the difference between when we got her and now is so huge - almost a year! We got a nice picture of us, Niblet and her dad outside the courthouse. He even asked for a copy of it. We have a photo album for him that we've already put a bunch of pictures in, so we'll print that one and some of the recent ones, and then they'll have a nice album full of her baby pictures.

We have hundreds more, too, that we'd be happy to share with Niblet when she's older, if we're all still in touch. And videos. She's just the cutest thing.

Okay, well, this post is all over the place, so I'll stop here. We're doing okay over here in FostermomLand. We're happy that we're not worried about Niblet and we're looking forward to what's coming up next in our lives.

If the camel's back weren't already broken...

...this would do it.
This morning, fostermama dropped off Niblet with her dad. We had her for 2 days. Next week we get her for one more day and then that's it, officially.
Niblet's dad mentioned the court date next week, on the day we're supposed to have her.

Um, what court date????!

He says he's known for a week. We haven't heard anything about it.
So fostermama gets on the phone to all and sundry to find out what the heck is going on. Obviously, it being the county, nobody's at their desk.

Finally, she gets a hold of another one of the foster parent case workers, who does the legwork for us and finds out that, yes, there's court scheduled for next week, on the day we're supposed to have her, at 11am. She obviously didn't know why we hadn't been informed.

This has been a problem before. Because of this, we specifically asked the baby's case worker (who would be the one to know about court first) if she would make sure to let us know as soon as possible when a court date is set. We knew it could be any day. It's her fucking job to let us know. She's federally mandated to do so, in fact. But we asked her politely. And she agreed that, of course she'd let us know. There were many witnesses.

And what did she do? Not tell us. Again.

Fortunately, Niblet's dad had no problem with fostermama asking if we could have Niblet the day before so we could have our last day with her be a full day, not cut up by stressful court proceedings. We'll bring her with us to court, put her in the court daycare, and then he'll take her home from there. Very likely, legal custody will actually be transferred to him that day, as well. So it'll be a great day for the 2 of them to have together to celebrate.

So, really, it's all fine. We left another message for the Bad Case Worker saying that we have the info and she needn't call us back, we'll just see her next week. We'll see if she even mentions it. I'm guessing not.

Once Niblet is officially out of foster care, we'll be filing a complaint against Bad Case Worker for neglecting to inform us of the court dates. All she'll get, I'm sure, is a "inform foster parents of court dates" from her foster-parent-hating supervisor, but that's better than nothing

We've changed our tune? Really, we've just changed.

Niblet's transition to her dad is going really, really well. Last week he had her for 4 days and she came back happy to see us, but not crying. Her first night back with us wasn't unusually hard. She had a cold, so really it was just the congestion that was bothering her.

Now she's with him for 5 days. We get her back for 2, then she goes back to him for 6 days and comes back to us for 1 final day.

Fostermama was saying the other night that Niblet doesn't live with us anymore. Some of her stuff is here, and we are here, but she really lives with her dad.
It's such a change from 1 year ago.

1 year ago, her parents had missed 8 visits in a row and had their visits cancelled.
1 year ago, chances were high we'd be able to adopt her.
1 year ago we took her into our house with the intention to raise her/think of her as our own almost from day 1.

Since then, so much has changed. Her mom "disappeared", her dad decided to "try" and get her back himself. We didn't feel positive about this at all. Obviously we wanted to raise her ourselves (really, if you ever met this kid, you'd want to, too), but we also felt scared for her. We felt like it would be a huge mistake for him to raise her himself.

But even that's changed, lately. He's not going to raise her like we would, but he loves her and isn't stupid (which was questionable at times) and does want us to be in her life in some way (at least for a while).

We were at our foster parent support group recently and were talking about how it's not a horrible thing that she's going to live with him. How that's really the *goal* of foster care and how everything really did work out the way the system says it's supposed to. Yes, the dad was given too much time, but not more than is federally allowable.

One of the other parents there commented "wow, you've really changed your tune". And I suppose that's the case. But, really, we've just changed. Period.

We are not the same people, the same parents, we were 1 year ago. Raising Niblet, helping Niblet, fixing Niblet, and letting her go...have all been life-altering.
Now we're looking forward to moving along with a domestic private adoption AND continuing fostering as often as we can. 1 year ago we were committed to adopting through fostercare (and hoping to adopt Niblet).

We're planning on taking a breather once Niblet is fully gone. No placements. Just adult time to relax, sleep, get to know each other and ourselves again, spend time with our friends and our friends' kids more, etc.

But we both know that we're going to miss having a baby around, miss fostering, and if they call us with a placement in that first month or 2, it will be very, very hard to say no. After that, I'm not sure what we'll say....

In a parallel universe...

We decided this summer that we're not going to count on foster care to build our family. Adopting through foster care, though our blog title, is just not possible in our county right now. We do know of some people who have recently adopted or have kids who are going to be TPRed, but that's few and far between. Kids are going home.

What we've decided to do is go through domestic private adoption. We will continue fostering, after a break of undetermined length, but we will get our first forever baby through private adoption.

We've picked an agency and started our homestudy last week. We're working on all the paperwork and are hoping to get our fingerprints tomorrow and get everything rolling asap. We'll be going to meet with the agency in October (it's out of town).

It's very weird to be talking about adopting and our future baby while we still have Niblet. She'll be playing on the floor and we'll be sitting there discussing what kinds of babies/situations we're willing to accept, etc., and it's just SO WEIRD. Niblet really was meant to be our child. Sometimes what's meant to be just doesn't happen. I can accept that, but it's still really hard.

To top it off, the social worker who is doing our home study (a friend of ours) told us the other day that she was talking with the head of the agency and that she said they have a birthmother in mind that they'd like to match us with, so they're hoping we get our stuff in soon. Or something like that.
I can't even wrap my head around that. Realistically, if it's true, if the baby is due anytime in the next few months, we would have to pass on it.
We need time to recouperate. To clean the house (we never fully unpacked, as we moved in 1 month before we got Niblet). To have time to ourselves, time together, before we commit to being parents 24/7 for the rest of our lives. 4 months is the minimum, I think, but a little more would be good too.
Of course, we don't want to wait too long, but the agency said that, given that we want a situation where we wouldn't have to pay very much for the birth mother's expenses, we'd probably have to wait 9 months for a match. If we were willing to pay anything, it'd be much sooner. This is mainly because we're open to any race and gender. Most of their clients want white girls. Whatever.

Anyway, it does feel good to be on this path. Having Niblet leave will be the worst thing in the world. Welcoming my first permanent child will be the best. Being on both paths at once somehow feels right.

Transition's Upon Us

It's been a while, but there's been nothing and everything to say.
We had another case review meeting (probably the last) a couple of weeks ago.
Niblet's case worker was actually civil to us, but only because we forced *our* case worker to come to the meeting to back us up, if need be.

The meeting was to be about planning the transition from us to Niblet's dad. Instead of a conversation, the case worker came with a calendar all laid out. It had been set up by her supervisor and wasn't up for discussion. Fortunately, it's not too bad and she did agree that if Niblet wasn't handling it well, that we could revisit it.

Basically, we're adding one overnight per week. This week it was 2 nights/2 days. Next week 3 nights/3 days, etc. So that by the end of the month, she's coming back to us for one day and then back to him for good.

I counted it up today and we have 16 days with her between now and the end.

Looking at it on a calendar is so painful. It makes it so real that she's leaving. She's really not ours anymore.

The dad has filed for custody, so it's possible that the judge will call us all to court and give immediate custody back to the dad before the end of the month. We discussed this possibility during the meeting and everyone seems to be in agreement that, regardless of who has custody, the transition should proceed as planned. We don't want to traumatize Niblet.

If there's one thing we are FIRM on, it's that this little girl is NOT going to end up with an attachment disorder because of the County's fuck-ups. We don't care what kind of trouble we cause, we will work with her dad to transition Niblet as smoothly as possible.

He's said numerous times that we're like family and that of course we will be welcome to visit Niblet after the transition. He's said that we could take her for overnights; that he'd probably welcome that. (Of course, this wasn't said in complete sentences, but that was the gist...I think...)

Our pipe dream, as of now, is that we'd be able to set up with him a weekly overnight. That we'd be able to have her Sunday morning until Monday morning. Give him some time off, give Niblet the security that we haven't abandoned her. I don't know if he'll go for something structured like that, and I don't know how long we'd want to keep it up. But, really, I'd be happy to do it forever. We kinda think of it as us being the "non-custodial parents". We can stay in her life, be a resource for her, and only see her once a week or whatever. Who knows how it would play out, but it's our hope right now.

She comes back to us tomorrow morning. I hope the extended visit wasn't too hard on her. I hope she continues to be as brave and strong as she always has been and starts seeing him as a parent. She's really the one who is going to make this work. I really do think she'll be okay.

There really needs to be some sort of competency standard for birth parents who're getting "their" kids placed with them/released from foster care. I realized the other day that her dad is older than the babysitter who we don't use anymore because she's totally wonderful with Niblet but her mental faculties aren't as sharp as they once were. And he's all drug-addled (past use we hope), too. There's no way it's actually safe to leave a child in his care.

But, she's going to live with him.
And he's eventually going to get an apartment, despite his total incompetence, because enough social services folks are working to get him a place. It might happen this Friday. Not holding my breath, as that would be the 4th time it "might happen" so far this summer. But once he gets a place, the transition was supposed to start in earnest. Only now her County Caseworker (evil one) is saying that any changes in her visit schedule will have to wait til the next meeting, which is not til 9/20. When at the last meeting, 8/9 or so, everyone was saying that once he got a place we'd revisit the visits even if it wasn't the next meeting yet.

So she might be in total limbo for 3 more weeks than necessary because this caseworker is so lazy and evil.

I'm feeling like for everyone's sake, I have to intervene. Today I called the placement supervisor to see if we could maybe get a CASA worker involved in facilitating the transition. She's on vacation til Friday. If she doesn't come through, or if the CASA thing can't be done, I think we should call the private agency caseworker's supervisor and see about getting her to advocate for a sooner change. She doesn't have the power to make the decision, but the County caseworker does see her as a little bit of a higher-up and if she pushed for something it might well happen. She will SO not want to get involved, but she's not stupid and will see that this is important so she might.

I'm torn about fighting for Niblet and possibly burning bridges vs. letting things go a little longer and allowing everyone to pretend things are OK. I'm tempted to file a formal complaint about not having been alerted to the court date and see if we can get the ruling changed to include a mandate for her father to attend parenting classes in order to get her back. There's no good reason it shouldn't have included that from the very beginning. And they SAY they're trying to get him help in that area but you know the County isn't gonna pay for anything if the court doesn't require it. :P

ARGH.

Huge mess.

All I want is someone in the system to stick up for her. There's a person whose job that is. Her "law guardian." But he doesn't do it. Not even a little bit. Won't even talk to us, even though it's in his job description to do so. Nods at whatever Evil-Caseworker says to the judge, without knowing thing 1 about whether it's true or right.

So awful....

Argh, part deux.

The Caseworker called yesterday, but fostermama was putting Niblet for a nap, so asked if she could call her back later. She was going to be in the office for an hour, and by the time fostermama wrestled the baby down for her nap and took a breath, the time was gone and I was home from work and she had to scurry out the door.

So I was going to call the cw back this morning when I got to work.

Well, as I was leaving for work, the phone rings. It's the Caseworker's Supervisor. Who has previously proved to be reactionary and not a huge fan of foster parents.

My initial thought had been that the CW was calling to, at the very least, let us know what happened at court on Tuesday, right? Maybe even apologize for not telling us about it (giving some excuse that clears her, obviously.)

But no.

The Supervisor starts in on the schedule we sent with Niblet to the overnight. The schedule that was recommended and looked over prior by the OT. The schedule that was, I assume, seen by the dad's caseworker last week. But now the Supervisor is telling me that it's inappropriate for the dad to have to fill that out like homework and hand it back to us. I didn't ask if she'd like it simply returned to her... She talked about how we were "overstepping our boundaries" and took the opportunity to let me know what the role of a foster parent is. Which is highly hysterical, given that the Caseworker has proven many times that she's not all that clear on that concept.

I did not apologize. I did not agree that it was a bad idea. She claimed that the dad felt "insulted" by it, but I somehow doubt that. I told her that it was only a tool and that he had requested a schedule and that the OT suggested this format and thought that, by filling it out, it would help him keep track and learn the baby's cycles. I told her that everyone else who had seen it had either liked it or not made mention of it.
I told her that what we do need to know is the last time Niblet ate and slept so we know when to next feed and nap her.

Fostermama was in the background trying to tell me not to engage this person, but I didn't need that warning. I listened to what she said, said "okay", and hung up.

WhatEVER. Do I think it's ridiculous that we were the ones keeping track of how he was doing feeding and napping her? Yes! Do I think it's ridiculous that we were the ones who suggested he start overnights before he has a permanent place? Yes! Do I think it's overstepping our role? YES! But if nobody else is going to do their job and do these things, and they seem happy for us to, then that's what happens. They want us to stop - fine.

So next week we'll send a note, like usual, and outline her regular schedule, let him know when she woke up and ate, and ask him to write down when her final nap and food is before we pick her up. (oy, my tenses are getting all out of whack!)
If "they" have a problem with that, then they can stick it up their patooties, because that is NOT overstepping our role. That's taking care of the baby as long as she is in our care. Which is our only goal.

I really have no problem with the fact that they want us to stop having him fill in the form. However, there are respectful, non-accusatory ways to approach this and she chose not to take that route.

At this point, when we decide to start taking foster babies again, we're going to pick and choose our placements based on who the caseworker is and who his/her supervisor is. We've had enough run-ins with this Supervisor to know that she poisons her team again foster parents and we don't need to deal with that extra aggravation.