My Family Moments: April 2009

Monday, April 20, 2009

CRossroads

It's 12:12am Sunday evening or it's Monday morning. I am sitting on the couch listening to the air conditioning going on and off and Murphy snoring. I just finshed watching Brothers and Sisters and remembering what I told Erwin about 45 minutes ago. "I am going to watch one more OPRAH and then Ill be in bed."

(taking you back to this morning...) It was about 3am Sunday morning that I finally went up to bed. After trying to fall asleep for 30+ minutes I came back downstairs, watched a SuperNanny and slept at 430am. Abby came downstairs at 830am and Ethan at 915am. We had breakfast..cereal, and then Erwin joined us at 10ish when I decided to go back to sleep. I woke up at 230pm and spent the rest of the afternoon with Er and the kids in the garage putzing around. We then headed to the Mac's for family dinner coming home at abuot 830pm. All this brings me to the present. What the heck am I doing? A mess! Cuz the kicker of it all is I had a migraine from Saturday morning till tonight at 7pm. Or Sunday at 7pm. Am I tired now? Probably...But I have Facebook to check out. I have my CM website to update. I'm sure I have 5 or 10 emails to respond to. And I for sure have about 7 OPRAH's to watch. I have to get up at 630am. I havent gone grocery shopping in forever so we have no breakfast fixins. This only means I have to give the kids a healthy breakfast. Scrambled eggs it is. How do you type in a deep breath? No idea. I just took one though. Today I was listening to a song by Trace Adkins, "you're gonna miss this". I started thinking. All this stuff I have on my mind which I haven't even begun to realize is stuff that truly doesn't matter. And I think that while I am being held down by all this crap, I am missing the things that I can never get back. I wonder if Erwin thinks that too. I shall ask him. Tomorrow of course. Since he is in dreamland already.

So, it's 12:26am now and I think I am going to check out Facebook for another minute or so and watch another show. It's quiet now and tomorrow when I wake up, Im gonna miss it, maybe ony for a minute or two, but i'll miss it! Till tomorrow at the same time, Ill probably be pondering the same question...What the heck am I doing? lol...Night all!

"Foster Family" Terminology

SW: Social Worker = This is a professionally trained (at times I feel from a YouTube video) individual who works for any County or private organization. My foster baby will have a SW and I will have a SW who is also known as a CCW. (see below)

CCW: Clinical Case Worker = This is a professionally trained individual, also known as a Social Worker who works for Angel’s Foster Family Network. They are assigned to a maximum of 12 families at one time and lead them through the fostering system. They are our right hand gal. (no males as of yet) This person does all the legal pushing and pulling on our behalf so we can focus solely on loving and caring for our foster babies. I would not and will not ever do my job as a foster mom without these people.

Supervised Visit = The bioparent has rights to see their child no matter the circumstances. Most often the visits begin as 1 to 2 hours, 1 to 2 times a week. An adult that is approved must watch the parent with the child at all times. (sometimes a lot of work and sometimes boring as heck)

Unsupervised Visit = The bioparent has rights to see their child no matter the circumstances before. If they are improving their situation then they will eventually get the right to have visits without supervision. The foster parent must drop off the child at an approved location and pick them up later. Most often the visit is for 2-6 hours 1 to 2 times a week. And these will only increase in length as the situation improves. (super hard for the foster parent to move to this step)

Foster Baby/Child = A child that has been removed from their biological family due to many different reasons affecting the welfare of the child. They are then placed in protective custody under the County and State.