Paperwork. I think I made more than a few comments about the paperwork as we went through the pre fostering time. It was extensive and tedious and extensive and tedious. Once we had completed the classes and the home study and had kiddos in our home one would have thought, maybe, that paperwork would be all done. However… we have chopped down another forest worth of paper since then. New paperwork is required. Car registration and health forms…
Notice to Provider. In order to take foster children to see a doctor, or to daycare, or physical therapy, or most other places one may need to go, a foster parents needs to have a thing called a “Notice to Provider”. This is just a simple piece of paper which states that we are responsible for them. The interesting thing is, you don’t necessarily know when you might need another copy of it. Being the brilliant thinker I am J I scanned the NTP and created a PDF which I sent to myself. In one case we were able to use the email only in the many other times this form still needed to be in paper. On more than a few occasions we found ourselves re-printing.
Documentation. So many things need to be documented from monthly visits by CPS to doctors and physical therapy visits, and even the bumps and scrapes kiddos learning to crawl and walk receive. If it happened and someone somewhere else might want to hear about or know about it the thing needs to be documented. Luckily in many cases these pages and papers could be virtual and passed along through fax or through email. A little bit of documentation at the time of any interaction goes a long way in making things run a whole lot more smoothly. The most interesting thing is that even after the kiddos leave your care more documentation may still be needed/required.
Certificates. Depending on the level of knowledge you have of Arizona’s foster care system you may or may not be aware that foster parents need to be licensed (which is not a bad thing). You also may or may not know that foster parents need to complete trainings throughout the time in order to renew this license. And you also may or may not know that even though the license is good for two years half of the required hours is due within the first ten months. The tricky part for those with kiddos in the home, many of the trainings are not children friendly (meaning that while the adult needs to be there most trainings do not have a place for the kiddos to be). This is especially difficult two foster parents who work full time. Luckily for us some of the time can be done online. We will hit our needed hours by the end of the day.
Two posts in two days; seems like this might be the calm before the storm. Still no idea what lies ahead of us. Thank you all for the many kind words and for taking the time to read.
The Baby Puzzle 