Foster Care and my thoughts

This is a story of my life with the foster care system in California and my personal feeling i have with it. Just my personal experience no nock on the system or the workers just all feelings.

So about a year and a half ago my sister in law had here second baby and when she was in the hospital after birth and her baby daddy was having a fit with something and the nurses called child protective services since they considered it to be a DV style case. You know a Domestic violence style issue and he wasn’t being physical but the the things he was saying and and how he was acting scared the nurses and feared for the children.

Child protective services came and took statements from the nurse and my sister In law I believe. Then it took them a few weeks to get their case together and inspect the tiny homes they were in and statements from the neighbors and even did drug tests on the parents. Now this was all bad for my sister in law and her boyfriend/baby daddy As their first kid just turned 2 and they had a newborn. So CPS did what they do and took legal custody of the girls. Now since my wife and her sister are close they asked for the girls to be placed in our care.

Now here is where the fun begins and the irony starts for this system that says their for the protection of children. In order for us to take the kids long term we had to register with the state finger printing about 40 hours in person classes about the foster care system and a online foster care collage program. They also a require a home inspection to check and make sure the house is good environment for the children. This all sounds good but they also require certain things that can’t be looked past. We had a above ground pool the entrance was about 5 feet high and the ladder was removable, the issues with this is that they require a fence around the pool even thought the kids could not fall in and the ladder was removed but they would not look the other way so naturally no pool for the summer :(. The restrictions for foster parents can be a lot water temperature, smoke alarms, monoxide alarms, animals, and history of every adult that is in the house. A lot of restrictions but we passed and were approved awesome.

My wife is running a small babysitting for family and close friends so we have a few toddlers during the week and our house inspection is during the weekend so the case manager and authorizer for the home and family approvals came by then. Now I don’t know if she was Having a bad day or something but she was very particular about the fact our house looked messy/dirty since their was a bunch of toys around after the kids were done playing. Her exact words were if they were not family she would not approve us for other kids to foster.

The question that all the cps personal ask is would you be willing to adopt if it came to that. (Of course our answers was yes they are our nieces) the personnel of the cases would tell us with the children being so young, around the 12 month to 18 month they start the adoption process and we were ok with it but we would hope they can go home sooner since the longer they are with us the harder it would be to let them go.

This is as much as i can muster right now

Let me know your experience and or thought thank you for reading