Other Brother

Normally, parents and foster parents have a meeting to get to know one another and to facilitate communication.  That never happened with Baby O's mom.  I don't know why.  The case planner never came to visit either.  I called and left at least three messages the next three days.  I was still wondering if she was going to call me and ask me if I wanted to take the older sibling, the three-year-old boy.  

Honestly, I didn't even talk it over with Darryl, but I had decided that I would have happily taken him too.  

It was the oldest brother who was eight that was the problem.

When your house is certified or "opened," they tell you how many kids you are "opened" for (basically how many beds you have room for and how many kids you can reasonably accommodate.)  Yes, we have four bedrooms upstairs in our house.  Darryl and I have one, Tiernen has one, and one is the nursery.  The other is my "office" where my books and desk and crochet stuff are stored.  It has a TINY closet we use as our linen closet.  When we were "opened," I assumed it would be for one since we had ONE crib, but The Agency said we were opened for two because we had a crib AND and Pack N Play.  Putting a three-year-old in a crib is pushing it, and so we would have had to go buy a toddler bed.  That would have been fine.  But I was unwilling and unprepared to give up my office, furnish it for another child, or (if I'm honest) take on that responsibility of THREE children.  

I put it out of my mind because we had had Baby O for almost a week and the case planner still hadn't mentioned either brother.  I figured that the others were well-established in their foster homes and they wanted to leave well enough alone.

Except that isn't how foster care works.  Agencies (not just mine) will move kids repeatedly to make sure that they are all in the same house.  I understand this.  This makes sense.  What doesn't make sense to me is that the other two brothers had literally never lived with Baby O (they were both in foster care longer than he had been alive),  How could they miss what they didn't have?

And then the phone call came.