[Krissy_and_Chris]

Hi everyone! I am new to this whole process and decided to join this forum for a little insight and guidance when needed. My husband and I are unable to have children naturally and so have begun the process to foster and hopefully some day adopt. We have filled out the paperwork to be respite care providers and go Tuesday (7-15) to get our fingerprints taken. We have aso begun to fill out alot of the other papers needed and will begin "foster" classes at the end of September probably. So I guess my first question would be what do we need in order to provide respite care.......bottles, sippy cups, car seats.......let me know so I can go shopping!

[Withay]

First, welcome to the forums. Glad to have you here. You will find that this is an excellent place to come for advice, or just to vent.

What to buy depends on what ages you are planning to foster, or provide respite for.

If you are fostering you will want to have a bed/crib for each child. You will also need a dresser, or section of a dresser (at least 3 drawers) for each child. Depending upon what ages you foster you may need to have things such as diapers (generally size 2) on hand, bottles, a few receiving blankets and clothing for a couple days for infants. For toddlers you would want some size 4 diapers, sippy cups, a few clothes and some toys. Each age comes with its own set of items you would need on hand.

If you are doing respite, the foster parents should provide you with everything the child(ren) would need while at your home.

Good luck.

[Krissy_and_Chris]

Thanks!! We are doing respite while we get through the classes and paperwork to become certifide to foster. We put down ages 0-10 to foster, but they didn't ask us on the respite paperwork We have a full size bed now, and have a friend who is letting us borrow a twin sized bed, we are also going to buy a crib. We have two bedrooms that we are not presently using so we are going to set one up with the full bed and the other up with the twin bed and crib. so I guess we could actually take in 4 if they were siblings and their ages were right for the beds we have (two in full bed, one in twin and one in crib) BUT we really only want to do one at a time...at least until we get the hang of the process.

[CaddoRose]

We did respite too while taking classes and had ages from 10 months to 12 yrs old. The foster parents packed everything we would need for the babies. I began to go to garage sales and thrift stores looking for a few toys for babies up through about 7 yrs old. Mainly looking for gender neutral things like balls, building blocks, books, puzzles,etc, so that they would have at least a few things to play with while here. I got a booster seat and a high chair. It's a good idea to have a few sippy cups, extra bottles and bibs, but I only got a few of these things.