Kiddos

A while back I had written a post about how plans change over time and my idea of an ideal life in highschool has no semblance on what I now desire. I have been thinking about this more recently. As my second year of dental school winds to a close and I realize that I am almost halfway to finally being all grown up, I have been doing a lot of future planning.  This planning is in a constant state of flux as we get more of a feel for what the fostering and adoption process will look like.
When I was young I thought having a dozen kids would be cool.  I can tell you with all certainty I no longer think that would be fun.  My ideal would be 3-4 kids with either two or six as a somewhat comfortable buffer.  I would definitely want more than one and six seems a little scary, but crazier things have happened.

The other day we went to Petco to get a new food bowl for Captain Flint. We decided their $15 food bowls were too expensive, but spent the next three days agonizing over whether or not we should take home one of the kitties they had for adoption in the front of the store. By agonizing I mean Kristin really wanted one and I was dying inside a little bit each time she asked and I realized I have no backbone to say no to her sweet sad eyes and that I might soon have two cats terrifying the soul out of me.  We finally decided it was not the right thing for us, but it made me wonder how we will handle various fostering situations.


Obviously there is a big difference in how we handle having a cat on the couch behind us.



Scenario 1: Lets say there is a family of six small kids age 0-8 that come into the foster system (probably have to have some twins or triplets or multiple baby mommas for the math to work out right). We are going through the class with two other couples from church and they decide that to keep the kids close for now they will place two with each of us. Then right as we are preparing to leave Greenville and start our life back in Raleigh they all become eligible for adoption and need a permanent home. They all want to stay together, but there is no one willing to take on six kids.  The only question then is would we have to get a fullsize van or could we fit all eight of us into one of those Expedition ELs.

You can get with this...

or you can get with that

For any of you (like Kristin) who that last reference was lost on here is the link. Enjoy!

OK so that scenario is a stretch, but realistically how far are we willing to be stretched by God.  Could we take on 2-3 kids at once?  What if it is a newborn or an eight year old? What if there are behavioral or medical issues?  The truth is I don't know.  Some of those things scare me a lot more than others, but I do know that God has the perfect kids already prepared for us and already knows the whole plan and that is incredibly comforting.  Even when I start to get freaked out (I just pray he doesn't have more cats in this plan anytime soon).

I more often find myself imagining idyllic little scenarios of us with these kids.  In my mind they will love going to the zoo and we will have all of these awesome family vacations to different zoos around the nation.  They will grow up to be these perfect little swimmers after Kristin teaches them (because I am terrible).  They will all love playing with playmobil pirate ships and will never break any toys.  We will have such fun going shooting and playing basketball.  The list goes on and on.  I know these are fantasies.  Raising kids has WAY more challenges than I can possibly imagine.  They probably won't like all the same things I like (and really dragging a bunch of tired hungry kids around a zoo was already starting to sound like a bad plan in my head).  No matter the unanswered questions we still have, the hurdles yet before us, the difficulties that we will face, I know that this is what we were called to do and I can't explain how seriously freakin excited we are to be growing our family!

~Buzzy

I wonder how many kids we could fit on a rhino