What Is Foster Care About?

Foster Care is about taking care of children and sometimes near adults, who have minimal or impaired family resources to care for them. It can be something quite temporary such as having a caregiver who is hospitalized without alternative ways of caring for their children. It can be something where a parent or family member can’t or won’t put the needs of their child as a priority.

Our Experience

Foster Care is about as diverse as the people who do it. I am a Pediatric nurse and have been for 35 years now. My husband is also a nurse with a broad skill set. In the late 1980’s I begin working in Pediatric HIV after having avoided any area in nursing with a high incidence of death and dying.

This was early in the epidemic and there were no medications in pediatrics for treatment of HIV with the exception of beginning research medications. The children I cared for were delightful but fragile. Most had a nightmare social history with often the entire family or at least mom and child being diagnosed at the same time.

No one talked about having HIV which meant there was no support system for positive parents or their children. I say all of this because this is what lead my husband and I to become foster parents. We were going to be care providers for children while their parents were hospitalized or in some other way unable to care for them.

The baby that nudged us in that direction was a 24 week preemie that was HIV positive whose mom had little support with an increasingly sick child. He was getting worse and his mom was not being able to care for him so we began the about 12 week trek to become licensed foster parents.

While Justice was our motivation to begin foster care we never actually cared for him as a foster child. That was for another foster family – for we were licensed on February 29th and Justice slipped to sleep on February 5th. 

Our respite services were in demand and we cared for several children with HIV infection. Our biological children then 10 year old Marisa and 12 years old Erin were educated on safety and universal precautions.

While respite was our intention, we were asked to foster an 18 day old infant, the youngest of 9 children, who was HIV exposed during mom’s pregnancy and had been sick. We expected from his story that he would test HIV positive. With greater than 50% risk factors for being HIV positive, God’s grace would have it that our precious Quin was HIV negative. Even though he was HIV negative Quin was a sick baby with LOTS of ear infections and breathing problems.

He was challenging in many ways but was our hearts delight. People were naturally drawn to him and at 23 years old – today they still are. Shortly after Quin’s sixth birthday he became our legal son. We had cared for other children while Quin was little but never for over a few weeks. But even though we thought we were done with fostering, God had other plans…..