full discloser

This evening we went to full discloser for Kr a 12 year old girl who will be coming to live with us.  I cannot tell you many details since it is not allowed (I signed a confidentiality form) but i can tell you that full discloser is a sobering experience.  You hear everything that the child has ever done- mainly just the "bad" since the good is usually not made note of.   If you think about it, none of us would sound like very good people or at least people you would want to invite into your home if someone was making note of every argument, of every mistake and thing done in anger/pain.  That is without most of us having gone through even half of what children in the system go through.  Needless to say full discloser is not for the faint of heart.  As a "child" or at least not a parent i was not allowed to read through the paperwork, I am thankful for that.  Just having heard about what Kr has gone through was enough.  Mom and Da have to read through a 3 inch stack of paperwork describing what Kr has gone through and then at the earliest let the social worker know tomorrow.  

 

Tomorrow we will make the call and say whether or not we will take Kristina.  We will.  She is a hard child and it is not going to be easy but already it is hard to imagine life without her in it.  It was not what we were expecting on our adoption journey.  We have only know about Kr for 2 weeks now and if we say yes (which we will) she will begin living here with us by the end of this week.  She will start out as a "foster child" and we will see how thing progress from there.  I find it very unlikely that once Kr is in our family for more than a week we will ever want to let her go.  I am not naive to believe that all will be pleasant and happy- it won't- but i also know our family and how deeply we love.  I cannot know the future and after our last adoption was disrupted I cannot say what God wants of us but my heart and my gut are telling me that we are on the right path.

I have already had several surprises from the way I reacted to Kr and not all of them were pleasant.  I was jealous and annoyed and angry.  Not emotions I expected to feel.  Along with those emotions were love, and caring, and wanting to protect her.  I guess that is what being a sister is really about taking the good with the annoyances.  

 Life is very rarely boring in this house and things are about to get a whole lot more interesting... Heaven help us (and I do mean that! Please God be with us on this journey!)