Well we officially fell off the grid and into parenting full time. This time with E there was no chance of him leaving, what a new and refreshing experience for us! We took a break from foster care for the first 7 months of E's life and a lot happened in that time. We learned what it was like to care for a newborn, our previous parenting experiences included age 4 months to 2 years. I struggled hard with nursing, or really E struggled hard with nursing, and after trying everything including lip and tongue tie revisions, I made it almost 6 months before throwing in the towel with pumping. Unbeknownst to me, I was suffering with postpartum anxiety hardcore which not having a successful nursing journey didn't help with. We took our first international trip as a family and spent a wonderful week in Amsterdam.
Probably the most amazing thing to happen during our break from foster care is that we got to reconnect with our awesome little Baby M, who now wasn't so little! It took about 4 months for his family to reach out, but we've been so blessed to be able to build a new relationship with him and his family and to spend time with him. He's 3 years old now, but he's still such a fun little guy. We usually have a sleepover with him about every 6 weeks.
Shortly after our return from Amsterdam we decided to buy a new house and sell or townhouse so that we'd have more space. And in true Crate fashion, because we can't just do one major life event at a time, a 6 month old little girl moved in the day before we closed on our new house. You should have seen our realtor and mortgage brokers faces when we waltzed into the closing with two infants! We definitely needed that bigger house. Suddenly we found ourselves with a 6 month old and an 8 month old and no clue what the heck we were thinking! Baby A was a difficult placement for us. She had some additional needs that we hadn't anticipated that involved lots of appointments and therapies that were tough to juggle as two working parents with full time jobs. Luckily my work has super family friendly policies and we were able to make it work, but it was no easy task. Some of A's needs also just made it really tough to care for her and so we spent about 7.5 months juggling two babies, one of which had a lot of sensory stuff going on that resulted in lots of crying. It was hard. Hard may be a bit of an understatement. But we were happy that she was able to make huge strides while with us, learning to eat, roll, sit up, and stand! We had a lot of good moments as well. We celebrated Halloween as a family of four, two first birthdays, we traveled to Virginia for the holidays with family and had lots of giggle parties. We were also really excited and ready when she was able to return home to her family. We haven't heard any kind of updates, but we hope she is still making great strides!
After Baby A returned home we had a couple of months off from foster care again until we learned that our very first long term foster placement had returned into foster care. We weren't entirely sure what that meant, and this time she had two little brothers. The agency needed to separate the siblings in order to find a placement and although we weren't the initial placement for any of them, the foster family that had N had some family emergency and so she moved in with us. It was only about a 3 week placement and she was able to return to family, which we were happy for. This time around with N was different. A lot of the really difficult behaviors she had as a 2 year old were gone and things were mostly easy, except the fact that she really missed her family.
Shortly after N moved out we got a call for the placement of a 7 month old baby girl. At this point Jennie and I were on somewhat different pages. While I felt called to foster and add another baby to the mix, Jennie was really struggling with the addition to our already busy and often hectic schedules. We talked for what seemed like forever and ultimately said yes to the placement, this was no easy compromise. While I rushed home to get everything ready for this new addition and figure out what all we needed we got a phone call from the agency letting us know that they were going to hold off on the removal and that they would place the baby with us in a couple of weeks. We agreed to take the placement in a couple of weeks as long as we didn't get called before then for a newborn placement. This actually helped mitigate a lot of the fears Jennie was having, you see Jennie is a planner. And one thing that you usually don't get with foster care placements is a chance to plan. Usually you have an hour or less to decide whether to accept a placement. Having almost two weeks was like some kind of miracle. We now had time to process what it would be like to add another baby to the mix, Baby E was now 20 months and we could envision what it would be like to have another little one around.
Fast forward about a week to early June, just a typical Monday at work when Jennie calls me. Our agency had called her and they had a newborn baby boy that needed to be picked up at the hospital. The funny thing is that the agency always calls me first and rarely ever calls Jennie. My theory is that they do this because they know I'm more likely to say yes to a placement :) Well, this time they called Jennie after trying to reach me with no answer because I was in a meeting. We had let the agency know that we were really interested in a newborn placement. Given E's age, a newborn just made sense for us and what we felt we could manage at the time. One mobile kid felt like a lot! So this time around we didn't have to chat long before deciding that we would accept the placement. We didn't know much about this little guy except that he was just a couple days old and seemed healthy. We had about an hour and a half to get to the hospital, so I left work and swung by target to buy a car seat. Jennie and E meet me there. E was super excited and interested in the baby right away. He wanted to touch him and was all smiles and laughter at every sneeze or movement of the baby. Jennie and I were kind of in shock at it all, we really had no idea how he would react. After about an hour and half we walked out of the hospital with a baby. I'm pretty sure we said something along the lines of "holy shit, we just walked out of the hospital with a baby". It was a strange drive home with a new baby in the back seat. We had so many questions, but not a lot of answers in this case.
The first night at home was really tough. The baby hardly slept at all, Jennie and I had completely forgotten what it was like to be up all night. I also found myself thinking a lot about this little baby's mom. How this baby was here with us while she was experiencing all of the things that happen to a person's body after they give birth. I think this hit me like a ton of bricks because of my own experience with birth and what comes along with it. Foster care is such a complicated system and while there is joy there is also a lot of grief and loss. The agency did call us back about the 7 month old when the baby was about a week old and we had to tell them that we had a newborn and couldn't take the placement. But she ended up being placed with friends of ours and is doing great.
As usual the first few weeks were a whirlwind. I was able to take some family leave and figure out how to bring him to work with me as part of our infants at work program, which was a bit of a battle. Apparently at some point the county had decided this policy didn't apply to foster babies. Thankfully my supervisor and our HR director went to bat and he was able to come with me. Shortly after he was placed with us Jennie also left her job at the museum to pursue photography full time so she's now working from home which is really helpful.
When the baby was about 2 months old we got a call from the agency that N had come back into the system for a third time. We were really sad to hear this news and although we didn't think it was the right time to add a third child to the mix, we couldn't imagine her going to another home. We were initially told it would be a quick placement and then she'd return home so we figured we could do anything for a few weeks, especially with Jennie working from home now. Turns out that wasn't exactly the reality of the situation. Life with three kids and two different cases was quite the adventure. Double the visits, caseworkers, home visits, court hearings--it was no joke. Not to mention most days we had to drop three kids off in three different places. Unfortunately when the five of us were all together were the toughest moments. N really struggled to share attention with the two little ones and spent most of our time together crying and vying for attention. After a super hard four months we made the difficult but right decision for her to move to another foster home. Unfortunately the composition of our home with two small children was just too much to handle and didn't provide the amount of one on one attention she needed to start healing. She's now in a home where she gets to be the baby and if the case leads to permanency they are an option for that.
So now we're into 2019 and we're back to a family of four. E is now just over 2 years old and the baby is 7 months old. They're great together and any time anyone talks about the baby E says "That's my baby!" We're getting a chance to really enjoy the littlest one now that things have calmed down. He's got a ton of personality, loves to smack his lips and stick his tongue out and is starting to experiment with food. It's funny, the times we had two kids we thought it was so tough. Nothing like parenting three kids for a few months to make two kids feel easy :)
Well if you've made it this far, hats off to you! I know things have been pretty quiet on our end for quite some time, but I hope to keep you all updated more regularly.
