Bowie: A Life Afloat

     What a whirlwind the first 5 months of this new year has been! We started out with a new year, new adventures, new training, new journeys, new outlooks, and a new church home. This year has been a year of firsts for everyone! There's a ton of lesson learned, tear cried, there might have been an argument or two, but who keeps count of those?!      As we begin to end out the month of May, we also look forward to the summertime with June just around the corner! We had a good meeting last week with our foster agency and have set new parameters for ages of kids we are willing to take in for now. Our kids need to know that not all foster care placements are raging, yelling, screaming, cussing, hurting themselves, and attempting hurt others. They need to know that there are placements out there for all types of families!      I feel strongly that if you have the space and heart for it, then I urge you to become a foster parent. We all bring o...

     There are a lot of things in life that you can get a redo on.  For instance, say you want to renovate your house and as you are working hard and perfecting the place you realize you picked the wrong color for the walls. Well, after working all day, you can redo it and change the color.  If you are working on a big project for work and come up with a new idea, then you can redo it to make it better. But what happens when you can't really redo something? You can't take back words that were said, you can't take back days you've lost, you can't reraise your kids differently.       So what do you do? You learn from your past.  You try your hardest to not repeat those mistakes that were made. You find something that was good in all of that and you move forward. You take those missed lessons and you apply them.  Sometimes hard choices have to get made, in order to preserve what's already in place.  Parenting is hard, easy, ...

Wow, how in the world did we fast forward a whole month?! Oh yes, I know how....foster care! I just found out today is Foster Care Awareness month! As of tomorrow, we will have been foster parents for 5 weeks! Time sure does fly, whether it's fun or not!  I am going to talk about the top 10 things I have learned so far: 1.  It's ok to say no. Ok well, maybe this isn't the easiest thing in the world. Before fostering I was not going to be that person who said "no" to a child. To me, that was just passing on a kid to find the best one. I felt that I can help them all, I can get through anything they threw at me or anything they said. Well, I was wrong. Sometimes it's ok to say no, because when you break it down all the components of your family versus a child(ren) whose past is somewhat shaken, then there's going to be some struggles. Struggles are normal, but all out wars that become quite physical are not normal. Really think about the dynamics of your f...