Author: Stef Lewis

The part of foster care that no amount of training can prepare you for is how the relationships develop. We didn’t treat our girls as “foster” children. We treated them as “our” children. We took them everywhere. We played together. We just went on with life. We developed a relationship with them. It was just

I had a meeting with our case worker pretty soon after our first girl was moved. I don’t remember why. As with a lot of times in my life, my mouth running without my brain engaged changed the course of our lives forever. I had been thinking about our experience to that point. She asked

December 14th. That is a date I’m sure I will never forget. It is the day we got the first call. My phone rang early afternoon and it was a caseworker informing me that she had a little girl for us. She told me all about her. She then asked if we would take her.

I am a person that needs to be an expert on a thing before actually engaging it. So,  from the outset, it was an infuriating process. I fell for the PSAs…”You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent!”  I totally believed that it would be simple. I thought they needed foster parents?

Tomorrow (Sept 13) is my oldest daughter’s 22nd birthday. That means I have been part of her life for 12.54 years. She was 9 years 5 months and 16 days old when I met her for the first time. She and her 5-year-old (5 years 3 months and 19 days) full biological sister came into