Foster Care License #1

When adopting through the county of San Diego you have to have a Foster Care License, even if you are not doing foster care.  The reason for this is because the children you will be adopting will be in your home for about 6 months before the judge signs the papers saying that these children are now yours.  Meaning, the children are still in the foster care system till they are offically adopted.  Which is a good thing, because this way they are in your home and their social worker will come every month for those six months and check on them to make sure they are adjusting and to see if there is anything the children or the parents need to help the adjustment of becoming an instant family.  So... it is a good thing.

After all the cleaning and the preperation to get ready for the foster care social worker to come, the anxiousness doesn't go away but intensifies.  Our worker came and sat down with us to go over our paper work and look at our home.  As I sat there with her in our home I didn't know what exactly to say.  I worried I would say the wrong thing, or say to much, or not enough.

She went over our paperwork and there were two things that were a concern.  They tell you to be honest (of course).  If you don't answer all the questions and they find things out later than they will deny your application to adopt.  Sometimes there are things in your past that can come back and hurt you.  There were two questions on the application that I was worried about.
1. Have you ever been hospitalized for mental reasons?
2. Have you ever been convicted of a felony, or arrested?
I knew that these two questions were going to be asked and I knew I had to answer them honestly if there was any chance of us adopting.  For the first question: I was hospitalized for severe depression over 12 years ago.  In 6 weeks I lost two friends, a great uncle, a great aunt, a great grandmother, and my grandmother., all of whom were very important to me.  I also lost my jobs, all around my birthday.  I became very depressed and doctors put me in the hospital and on medications that really didn't help me, but made it extremely worse.  It took a few years, but I came off the meds and was back to my fun loving self.  I had no problems after that.  For the second question: I was arrested for a warrant that was over a year old that I had no knowledge about.  I recieved a ticket in Utah when I was married to my X and I had given him the money to pay it.  Well he pocketed the money.  I found out about it when I was arrested in Arkansas almost two years later., and I had been divorced for two years.  I was in jail for 11 hours and that was terrifing.  All I had to do was pay the ticket and it was over.  Even though both those things were terrifing and not good, they are in my very distant past.

After going over the paperwork the social worker went through our home to make a list of everything we were going to need to do to get the license.  You have only 90 days to get this all done.  This is the list:
 
1- Alternate plan needed for cell phone/telephone
2- CPR & 1st Aide certification needed
3- DMV Report needed for Catherine
4- Hazardous chemicals need to be inaccessible- and poisons locked
5- Beds needed, bedrooms need to be ready, also crib needed
6- Working smoke detectors needed by all bedrooms (one in studio)
7- Medications need to be inaccessible
8- Railings need a protective covering
9- Fish pond needs to be fenced or removed
10- Car seats needed

Now this is a good list.  When we took the P.R.I.D.E. classes people who had already gotten their License talked about how the lists were always really long and took forever to get finished.  So we were a little nervous.  But this is a good list.