[lishop]

Hello,

My husband and I have been considering foster/adoption for around 7 years now and we are wondering if now is the time. We have two kids who will be 5 in the next few weeks. One is our bio son and one is our daughter from Liberia. My concern is that we had to disrupt the adoption of the 8 year old boy we adopted from Liberia. He came home in August of 05, two months later we found out about significant sexual abuse in his past, in Nov of 05 he tried to molest a young girl, and in Feb of 06 we found out he had sexually abused at least 5 young boys in his orphanage and was planning to do this to our kids. So, it has been 3 months since our disruption and he is being adopted by a therapeutic foster care family. Our social worker and his therapist did not support him staying in our family because of the safety of our two little ones, so we didn't even have much of a choice.

We have already been approved by two agencies to adopt internationally or domestically through them in the next year. We plan on one or two kids younger than ours. So, would the state approve us? Would we have to wait a certain time period to start training classes? We live in an area where there aren't enough foster parents and we have wanted to do this for so long.

Also, is there a regulation about how many children per bedroom? We have a 4 bedroom house so I'm sure we would be fine, I just didn't know if they can share.

Thank you,

Melissa in Oregon

[Ians mom]

I am not sure about Oregon but in Ohio it is fine for children to share a room (same sex of course).

I dont think your disrupted adoption would prevent you from fostering children. You acted to protect your other children from being hurt and it sounds like a loving, safe home was found for the other little boy.

I would call the agency in your area and get started. It took us awhile to get all of our paperwork together and then we waited a few more weeks for the next set of classes to start but in the end it was all worth it.


Good luck!!

[Withay]

Melissa -

I would recommend that you call either the DHS office in your area or DHS's Central Office in Salem.

Blessings,
Lynda

[lishop]

My husband called our local DHS this morning and found out that the case worker for our side of town is on vacation for a couple of weeks. He talked to the other case worker for our town and she said as long as we don't have any criminal history or any negative dealings with cps (which we don't!) then she doesn't see any problem with fostering as long as the kids are younger than ours. She is sending us out an invitation to the next set of classes which start in June. She did say that starting out with the adoption class and trying to get matched may be a slow process because of the disruption, that sw's might not take the reasoning into consideration, so fostering would be a better option.

We have looked at foster care for around 6 years and my husband always wanted to do it in the future. In the last week we have had a front page article in our newspaper about foster/adoption and we have been called by friends looking for adoptive parents of our specific religion for a sibling set. They decided not to place them out of state, but the combination of these things really got us to thinking that now is the right time. Plus we got a 7 passenger vehicle a couple of months ago so we could take siblings.

Thanks for the replies,

Melissa