Whenever I am planning on doing something, especially something that seems big, I have a real tendency to wait. I’m a planner by nature, planning feels safe and comfortable. Jumping in is harder and feels more dangerous.
I attended a conference last week (via Zoom because, you know, COVID) and heard a talk from Gwen Adams (her book “Crazy Church Ladies” is scheduled to come out next March – amazon link). Gwen leads a women’s ministry that has grown into a large organization that works with sex trafficking victims (among other things now) in Alaska. She talked about starting small, starting as nothing more than a prayer ministry. Some of the notes I jotted down from her talk were these:
- You already have what you need to start.
- It starts where you are and with who you are with
- You can’t wait until it’s all perfectly set up to begin
Our life has transitioned now that our foster license is closed. It happened unintentionally on our part, but it’s a very clear shift. Instead of taking new foster care placements, we’ve been doing a lot of respite.
If you’re not familiar with the term, respite just means substitute care for a foster or adopted child. When foster parents want to go away for a trip, say an anniversary or sometimes vacation, if they can’t bring the kids with them then the foster kids need an arrangement that is agency approved. When you are a licensed foster home, you are automatically approved to do respite care for another foster family, your license is your approval.
But we aren’t licensed anymore. We can still do respite, actually anyone can do respite, it just means we have to fill out some paperwork so the agency can run a background check on us before we take care of any foster family’s kids. We have to do this for each family we provide respite for. Once we are on their list, we are approved to take care of their kids.
As you might imagine, it can be really hard for a foster family to find respite. Most of the licensed homes are full, or their life is busy and crazy, and many other people are nervous at the thought of caring for foster kids. This is especially true when we are talking about older kids, like teens.
So since we can’t take new placements, we can still do respite. And we have been! We are providing respite for two different families right now, as a matter of fact, so we have a total of four extra kids in the house this weekend.
People always say, “Whoah, you have 11 kids already, how can we ask you to take any more?” And at first glance, it does sound crazy. It seems like families with only 2 kids should be taking the extras, since they have more space, right?
I’ve decided it’s not about the actual number of kids you are hosting, it’s about the percentage of increase. If a family with 2 kids were to take these 4 for the weekend, they most likely wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. They’d be cancelling plans, afraid to go anywhere, and they’d be saying, “Oh my goodness, I have 6 kids in the house!” all weekend long. It’s a 200% increase to their baseline.
But 4 more kids in our house is only a 36% increase. Doesn’t that sound much more manageable? Never mind we had 15 kids around the dinner table tonight, it’s only 36% more than normal, so we barely even made any more food than we usually do.
I said in my last post how are feeling the lack of space in our house, and that’s definitely true especially during these respite weekends. 15 kids in one house is a lot any way you look at it, and the house definitely feels full. It shows me how much we need to build something bigger, and how valuable that extra space is going to be. I’d like the house to not just feel manageable on weekends like this, but for my kids to still feel like they can invite their friends over! That might be a bit of a stretch right now.
But we really don’t want to wait until we have a new house with lots of space to do respite, either. You guys, respite is a HUGE need in foster care. It’s hard to find, and when life gets challenging in a foster home (and believe me, it DOES), that break to be able to regroup and refocus can mean the difference between a placement working out and not.
So if this is the direction that our life is headed with respite, teens, kids/placements in trouble, then we want to start now. Start with who we are with and with what we have. And right now what we have is 2200 square feet and 7 bedrooms.
We actually just last week shifted the rooms around again so that we have an empty bedroom again. We combined some kids into one bedroom (triple bunkbed for the win!) and now we have an empty bedroom available for respite. A bedroom which, of course, is full this weekend.
But I’m reminded that:
- You already have what you need to start.
- It starts where you are and with who you are with
- You can’t wait until it’s all perfectly set up to begin
Part of what we want to accomplish is to have room for respite and support for foster and adopt families, in addition to the aging out teens, so we might as well start now, right?
We are at the point of this journey where we are waiting to close on a property. I know how we are paying for the property itself, but I do not know how we are paying for the house. That part of the financing is not lined up yet. I’ve got some leads, but I’m still trusting that it’s going to work out.
I have some building phases outlined, and I expect a construction loan of some kind for phase 1, I have sort of an idea or hope about phase 2, and no clue how we are going to pay for phase 3.
I also haven’t settled on a building process yet. Are we going to hire a contractor to oversee the whole project and get it done quickly? Or am I going to be my own general contractor and hire the subs myself? Or am I going to build more slowly and do more of the work myself in order to keep costs down?
I really don’t know the answers to those things yet. So many questions still looming, but we are starting.
Step 1: Dream big! — check
Step 2: Decide on a piece of property — check
Step 3: Close on the purchase of the property — working on it
Step 4: Figure out all the rest of the details…