Soccer Mom!

I am officially a "soccer mom" - for the first time in 10 years! I am also a soccer coach! This is exciting for me because I have never coached a sporting activity before. It is also scary because I have never played soccer and know very little about it. A great book to the rescue! The Absolute Beginners Guide to Coaching Youth Soccer
The authors have me pegged and thankfully really do provide the basic education that one needs to be a successful coach from underlying philosophy to the practical nuts and bolt of the game and of organizing practices. I love finding the perfect book to help me when I'm in a pinch!

New Resources

This is a really cool series that and is as entertaining as it is educational. Our Dept. of Human Services offers it as one of the training resources that we can use that counts towards our 20 hours of required training/ year. I would recommend it to anyone. They explore the brain research that has taken place that helps us understand both "normal" and "abnormal" emotional states - they talk about Reactive Attachment Disorder, the importance of attachment, how to build enduring relationships, stress, depression, PTSD, grief, resilience, and finding happiness.

I added a new website to my list of favorite links. It is the Foster Club site and it has a great section for adults and a equally great section that is for youth.

They offer free on-line training- So cool!

The site is www.fosterclub.com

ID Cards

Another foster parent shared the suggestion in a book about creating an ID card for your foster children. (I think its a great idea for ALL children).
Some things to include:

Small picture
Date of Birth
Height & Weight
Insurance Information
Address and Phone number
Social Security Number (you may or may not want to include this information - I recommend putting this on one card that you keep at home, so you can access it easily, but don't run the risk of having it get lost or stolen.)

Of course, it is important to safeguard this information, however, it is equally important to be able to access this information quickly and easily when necessary. These cards can be given to respite care providers, childcare providers, or others who need this information. Your child may have one that he/she carries depending on age (A card with at least your name, phone number, and home address is important for your foster children to have access to and you can help them practice memorizing this information) and you and your spouse or partner may each want to carry one.

Scrapbook, lifebook - Good idea!

I made our foster daughter a scrap book this weekend. I made several picture-less layouts (baby, toddler, pre-school, K-1st, 2-3rd, and then began with creating layouts from our time together. She really loves it and I think it will help her with the transition back home because she'll have a nice set of pictures to look at and remind her of her live with us. She'll also be able to put pictures in from her life before and after us. I'm also making a scrapbook for us that is the "twin" of her scrapbook.
It was a really fun project and she seems to love it so far and I'm sure we'll enjoy having our book to look back at too when we are missing her!

Dreams

Last night I had a dream about one of my "grandfathers" (literally a close family friend, but was a grandfather figure for me.) During the past 5 years I have seen four of my grandfathers pass away. (Between step-grandparents and the close family friend I dreamed about I had the luxury and pleasure of having many wonderful grandparents.) It has been hard living without them and I do miss them a great deal. I occasionally have these really vivid dreams in which one of them is alive or is somehow very close to me. I usually cry in my dream and wake myself up because somehow I always realize that they are either dead or dying in the dream. I usually am really crying when I wake up too. The crazy thing is that even though these dreams are so sad in some ways, I love having them because for a few moments, I feel like the person is alive again or is somehow with me. I'd like to share a few special memories of each of my grandparents who have passed away in honor of them today. Thanks in large part to them, I am who I am and my has been blessed by their presence in it.

Grandpa P (dad's dad) ~ I was not especially close to Grandpa P, but I have a piece of him in me none the less ~ a little thing we have in common that I, no doubt, learned from him. It comes down to this memory of him always being happy to see us when we came for a visit and always standing outside in his driveway, waving and crying, when we left. I knew he loved us. As we drove away, I would look into his eyes, and I could see that love there and I would always be sorry that we had to go. I always felt like he would have liked to have us closer so we could spend more time together. He had his struggles, but he loved his family and I know he loved me.

Grandma P (dad's mom) ~ She passed away when I was 11 and was the first person that I knew who died. The thing I remember most about her is that her skin was so soft and that she had this sweet, pleasant, smell. When she would bend down to hug us when we got to her house, I loved the feel of her cheek against mine. She made tortillas and she was so warm and so loving. I'm really sorry I didn't get to know her better or get to have more time with her, but I am thankful for all the ways that she lives on in myself and in my extended family.

S ~ This is the one I had the dream about last night. I spent a lot of time growing up with S and his wife. He was a painter and a college professor and my mom would take me to his studio and we would visit. I'd usually get a cookie if we were at his office or some kind of ice cream if we were at his studio at his house. They would talk and I would listen. I really don't know what I did all the time. I laid around, looked around, enjoyed the art work, and listened. Looking back I don't know why I didn't crave having a DVD player, a book, a video game, or what ever other distraction to pass the time. Maybe I did do stuff that I just don't remember. What I remember is learning about the most important things in life. Somehow, (maybe by osmosis) this person who was a mentor and a kind of spiritual guide for my mom, became that for me as well on some level. He was a great man. A really really great human being who has been recognized widely as such and I'm so lucky that I got to share in his life and in his wisdom. He gave awesome hugs and he genuinely cared about people, including me. There were oceans in his eyes.

PP~ (mom's step-dad) I was really close to this grandpa. He and my grandma got married the year I was born and they were by far the grandparents who I got to know best and who invested the most time and energy directly in me. I visited them usually for a week or two in the summers, the gave me my first car, we went camping and boating together, I lived with them for a while in college and again when my son was born. My grandpa had this great convertible when I was little and then got a different one later in life . I have an awesome picture of him and my grandma driving down the road in this beautiful car. He spoiled me, he liked spending time with me, and he was a very warm and loving person. He and S are the only two grandparents that I have dreams about and in them I am always feeling so good because they are there and I am always so heartbroken when I have to let go again.
Somehow, I have to believe that he is with us, with me still. I don't know how or where or even if, but I want it to be so. I want to feel like these people that I love so much are still around me, watching out for me, and loving me as much as I am loving them.

Grandpa J ~ (mom's bio dad) I did not know him well. My mom only met him for the first time when she was in her 30's. We got to know him best at the end of his life when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My mom and dad moved him from his home in WY to a nursing home near us. My mom took care of him through his final months of life and we got to know him a little bit. He gave my mom the gift of life in the beginning and the gift of love in the end. I wish him peace.

Grandpa T~ (mom's ex-step-dad) He passed away when I was in my early 20's. The most vivid memory I have of him was when I was little and he and his wife were butchering a sheep at their ranch. They were running water through the intestines. I had never seen anything like that before! He was a hard worker. He had struggles with alcohol and was not always kind and loving, but he did have a lot of good qualities and we knew that he loved us. Even though he was not my mom's biological father, he was her sister's father and he always tried to treat my mom like she was his daughter. He was the man who was really her main father figure growing up and he included her in his will and in his life throughout the years. I wish him peace too.

Whew! What a cathartic experience this has been. My face is streaked with tears, but I feel like I've expressed something that I really needed to get out, so now I can feel some peace too!

The Care Conundrum

The way our society now cares for children and the elderly needs to be reexamined. Even in families where people want to be full-time care givers, there is such a focus on money that even when we are living well, we are trained to believe that we are not earning/having/doing enough.
I'll take my family situation for example. In an ideal world I would be a full-time home caregiver. I'd still be a foster/ adoptive/bio parent, but I'd probably also have my grandma come live with us and someday my parents as well. However, at this stage in the game, that is just not possible. We can get by without me working outside the home while I am in school thanks to scholarships and tax credits, but we don't have money for big vacations or other large purchases and we don't have money to buy a larger house. I feel very frustrated about the fact that my grandma can spend literally thousands of dollars per month living at a nursing home, we can spend hundreds of dollars on childcare, but if I took on the job of full time care giver I wouldn't get to have any of that money. (As a foster parent you are paid a set stipend, you don't get extra for providing "childcare" even though care will be paid for to other licensed providers if the foster parents work or attend school) It is a frustrating system and I wish our society would place a greater value on the role of care giving. It is essential, it is exorbitantly expensive the way we have things set up and we could be doing this all different. I'm sure there are people more knowledgeable than myself who could present a workable plan for providing monetary compensation to people who take care of their family members in a way that would be both efficient and fair.

Life Lessons

There is a student in one of the classes I'm observing whose father died this year and he is really struggling in school. It's one of those tough situations that teachers have to learn to deal with. I think one of the hardest parts of all is that you really don't know what impact you will have on the student over the long term. In the case of this child, he is rarely focused and (while I'm no doctor) I would guess that he is suffering from depression. They are throwing around the idea that he may have ADD or ADHD, but I doubt it, I just think he's really depressed. His family recently started attending grief counseling, so that is a good thing. I hope that the little guy can get the emotional and mental health support he needs so that he can begin to thrive in school instead of just walking through his days like a zombie.