We are getting so close to fostering, and daughter #4 is here the fourth week in a row for respite visits. For those of you who haven’t heard, she was a micropreemie, born at 26 weeks and weighing one and a half pounds. She spent her first six months living at Children’s Hospital LA, then she went to a wonderful foster family up in Simi Valley who have been fostering medically fragile newborns for 30 years. They care for the babies until they’re sturdy enough to go to “normal” foster families. Our little one has all the medical and developmental complications with a micropreemie, most notably, a feeding tube because her horrible reflux (she threw up five times in the first three days she was at our house and averages about a vomit a day) has given her extreme aversions to eating and drinking orally. Fortunately, the kids are all on board for helping hold her food tube for hours on end (we have to give her 5 oz formula+1 oz pureed solids four times a day)! And to complicate matters, Elizabeth came down with strep throat over the first weekend and had to be quarantined, so Susie and Janie stepped up and helped feed her! It was a blessing to see them embrace the Mommy’s helper role that their big sister usually fills so well.
The second weekend, everyone was healthy and we did great, but our social worker wanted us to see how a school week would go. So the third week, we had her until Wednesday, and we managed school, even with friends in town all day, and dropped her off after physical therapy, miserable to be saying goodbye until I got her again on Saturday night. On this fourth visit, she’s totally comfortable in our house and even helped us welcome students Sunday night. And on Sunday we had our very first vomit-free day with her, so we’re making progress on the keeping foods down front! Meanwhile, Tommy and the little girls continue to entertain and play with her nonstop, and Elizabeth has gotten comfortable hooking up and disconnecting her feeding tube and cleaning it out, so we’ll be able to leave all five kids with our babysitter tonight for a dinner hour date night without too many worries.
We’ve been too busy to take many pictures, but I really will try to take more for the grandparents’ sake! We’re just waiting for our agency and her social worker to get their act together to transfer placement to us permanently so we don’t have to keep hauling her back and forth between her old foster family and us. She’ll be adoptable after a termination of parental rights hearing in October, so we are planning on having her forever. Of course there are still lots of hoops to jump through and apparently a 6 month foster requirement before we’re eligible to adopt her (even though we’re certified to adopt already), so we would appreciate prayers as we continue to figure things out. We’ll be calling her Annie, and that’s how we’ll refer to her on the blog, even though we’re hyphenating her old name-new name in speaking to her right now to help her adjust. I can’t express how much we love her already.
Looks like everything is going well! So excited for all of you and can’t wait to meet her!!