While One Pair of Shoes is mostly an exercise and fitness blog, it is important to recognize that our lives have a lot of things going on besides getting in better physical condition or losing weight. It makes sense to me to sometimes write about other thins and how they can impact training methods and goals.
I can sum up that last four months with just one word. One word with 4 little letters that can change everything in an instant.
KIDS
My wife and I have been trying to have children for as long as we have been married. Without going into all of the details, we have not been successful in having a child. After 11 years of hoping and heartbreak, we decided to become foster parents with the possibility of adopting.
I can tell you from firsthand experience that becoming a foster parent is not an easy thing. There are classes, home visits and background checks. It is a very invasive process. Some of the classes, I believe, should be required for people having biological children, but, that is one person's opinion.
We decided that we wanted to work with infants. In the county that we live in, there is a lot of methamphetamine use, so as a result, there are infants who are born addicted and sometimes get placed in forster care within hours of their birth. Recognizing the statistics for what they are, we prepared our home for having an infant. We bought bottles, diapers, a crib and all of the usual things that new parents buy. It is often said that new parents find out quickly that no matter how prepared they think they are, they really were not that prepared at all. Being a foster parent, even with the training, is no exception.
In January, we got our first placement. While we had our house prepared for a single infant, our first foster placement took us by surprise in a lot of ways. We have a pair of siblings. One is a toddler and the other is less than one year old. We had to quickly adapt to the two little ones in our home. Bioparents get to work their way into the terrible twos. We went directly into it.
I am not going to talk about the specific things regarding the kids. We are not allowed to discuss or publish the details of what lead them to being placed in our home. Besides, it is their story, not mine to tell. I can tell you that we love having them here and hope that we get to keep them indefinitely. They have impacted our lives as much as we hope to change theirs.
