Waiting Children

Sometimes, it feels like people are surprised when others adopt children from foster care. As a parent who has, I can honestly say that I do not understand that mentality. I know that there is a lot of fear involved in the unknown and I think that is where people struggle. Fear is often the hardest part to conquer when doing anything. The other major concern that holds people back in the area of adoption is the changes that are brought about by the addition of a child, especially one from foster care. Yet, there are many courageous people who do foster and adopt children. They choose to look past their own comfort and delve into the unknown. To invest in a child… [more]

Great news for waiting children in Oregon just in time for National Adoption Month! The Adoption.com Photolisting is excited to announce that the State of Oregon is now featuring it's waiting children right here on Adoption.com. Now, the children in Oregon can be viewed by potential families from anywhere in the United States at any time of the day or night. Families who are homestudy ready and certified to adopt in their state can submit inquiries via the Adoption.com Photolisting Inquiry Form. Those not currently homestudy ready can submit a Homestudy Assistance Form and get matched with a caseworker in their area who can help them get started on the journey to adopting from the U.S. foster care system. National Adoption

This morning I had an appointment for a check up on my knee. Two weeks ago I had a big fluid filled lump on my knee cap. This is not terribly unusual since I have inherited bad joints from my Great-Grandmother. Fortunately, I inherited many of her wonderful traits as well. I don’t remember how this discussion started, but Hannah said to me: “Mama, you have to ‘dopt me yet.” Hannah has been with us for ten months, but we have not started our home study yet. We attempted to on a couple of occasions, but we were hitting road blocks with our county social services office. The worker we had at the time had her obvious opinions of me and stated them to… [more]

With National Adoption Awareness month coming up (more blogs on this coming in the near future), I decided to do some checking on foster care adoption statistics. It is still a fairly bleak picture. The latest statistics are from 2005. 114,000 children were waiting to be adopted on September 30, 2005. This only includes children under the age of sixteen and whose status is listed as available for adoption or whose parental rights had been terminated. Here is where a great divide comes in. Only 51,000 children were adopted from foster care from January 1, 2005 until September 30, 2005. If the current rates stay the same, that means that there will be approximately 50,000 more children waiting for a family… [more]

When we were going through our list of “criteria” for which children we could take into our home, and which we couldn’t one of the things at the top of our not list was medically fragile children. I would probably change that decision now. I know some parents who have medically fragile children, and still lead very busy and active lives. My husband has a good basic medical knowledge. He has been a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) for a little over ten years. He says the only thing he hasn’t done is deliver a baby, and unfortunately I can’t help him with that and none of our friends are willing to let him do the honors either. So what would qualify… [more]

A few years ago, the state adoption worker that placed Kory and Mackenzie with us, asked me to come and speak to the workers that placed children with adoptive families. Her request seemed simple. Make the workers understand a day in the adoptive parents’ life. She was an incredible worker. Unfortunately, she’s retired now. Her comment to me was awesome. “I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I get it as much as I can, but I don’t live it.” She was so on target. You don’t get it, unless you live it. Nancy Spoolstra and I spent a good bit of time discussing the best way to approach this. She helped me… [more]

Adoption.com has its own photo listing of foster adopt children that you can access here. The waiting children are shown state by state, (and also by country) and you can see if there are children in your state or close by. You can search by boy or girl, sibling groups or a single child, age, or, if you know the child you are looking for, by ID and name. There’s a search bar called ‘recently added’ children so you can look at the new children who’ve become available. Once you’ve found a child you are interested in, be sure to write down the ID number and then call your local DHS office with as much information as possible about the child. Some… [more]

How many children were in foster care on September 30,2005? 513,000 Continuing from my previous posts regarding the statistics of children in foster care I found these numbers(below) on The AFCARS Report. (I’m not a statistical anyalist by any stretch. I just liked reading the numbers.) Over 100,000 children in foster care are aged sixteen and above. Most children aged about 16 and above will age out of the foster system or move into adult care. (Of course, there are exceptions, and many older teenagers will be adopted, but the odds are against them). Another 290,000 will go back to live with bio-relatives. According to this same report, only 100,000 of these 500,000 foster children have a goal of adoption. The rest of the children won't ever… [more]

I always get confused when I read the stats about waiting children. Everyone seems to agree that there are about 500,000 children in foster care right now, but the numbers differ when you look at how many of those children are eligible for adoption. The numbers vary because of who is doing the counting and what year the stats are from, and where the children are. Some agencies might include legal risk adoptions - those who haven't actually had parental rights terminated yet, but probably will. Other agencies include children who will probably stay in long term foster care due to mental illness or disabilities that make it easiest and most benificial for the child to stay in foster… [more]

Watch, Tivo, Tape, Record. Make sure you get to see this great special coming up on CBS next Friday. CBS in conjunction with the Dave Thomas Foundation for waiting children is putting on a terrific prime special. How do I know it'll be terrific? Look who's in it:

• Singers that I love:

• Inspirational Adoptive Families: