A School Lottery, and the Magic of Stress

This week was a big one for S + A, complete with a final home inspection and a tiny foster parent training graduation ceremony.  We're about 99.9% through the licensing process, and are just waiting on those godforsaken fingerprints to come back to complete our application.  (Yep, still waiting.  Sigh.)  Four months of fingerprint processing seems excessive to us, but we're hopeful that it's just a sign that SO MANY people are applying to be foster parents right now, and that's what's getting us through.

Amid all of the frustration and doubt we've experienced in the past month since we were preliminarily matched, there was a small, silent shift that neither of us noticed--until it hit us like a ton of bricks.  Last Thursday, after our final class, and after a 2.5 hour-long meeting with the foster care director at our adoption agency, we put on our boots and coats and walked the 0.3 miles to the local middle school for a Pre-K3 to Grade 8 Open House.  There, we ran through the STEM-based curriculum, uniform requirements, homework expectations, meal schedules, extracurricular activities, and a school tour, alongside twenty of our comrades.  There, we were treated just like any other parents of prospective students, and I have to say, it felt wonderful.  It felt like Orientation Day at the best job in the world, like I had been waiting my entire life to calculate bus schedules and weigh the differences between magnet, charter, and neighborhood schools.  It felt like we are actually, definitely, totally becoming parents.

A takes in the view of the gym.

On the chilly walk home from the best middle school in the entire world, A and I held hands and excitedly waxed poetic through chattering teeth about this new development in our journey.  Suddenly, the fear of this adoption disrupting is no longer the loudest voice in my head, and instead, it's been replaced with the looming deadline for the school lottery--March 5th, in case you're wondering--and the chance that my boys won't be matched with the kindergarten that will get them into an excellent college.  It's figuring out our backup plan (Keep the boys at the school they're at, 30 minutes away?  Homeschool until first grade?  Private/Catholic school?) and calculating the cost of a second vehicle, should it come that.  It's planning for the future, in very real terms, and it's everything.

A with a legit NASA space suit hanging out in a random hallway at the school.  Apparently, an entire semester is dedicated to NASA-based curriculum in Year Six. I'm telling you, this is the coolest science and technology-based interdistrict magnet school in the history of interdistrict magnet schools.  Cross your fingers that we're matched here, friends!

So, that's our update for the week: not too much has changed physically, but pretty much everything has changed mentally and emotionally.  It's an incredible blessing, finding this beautiful magic in our stress, and we'll appreciate every bit of it until we can bring these boys home.