When Steve and George were placed with us both my husband and I took two weeks off of work so we had some time to bond with them. We knew we were going to adopt them; there was no question in our minds about that. We had requested that only children with parental rights already terminated or in the final stages. We did not want to take the chance that we would get attached to the boys and then have to give them back. In the state of Texas a child must be in your care before you can legally adopt them. During the time when we were foster parents we had to get permission for basically anything that we wanted to do. If we wanted to take the kids out of the county for a night we needed to notify the case worker. The rules that we had to follow seemed silly especially when we needed to get permission to cut Steve’s hair.
We had to call them regarding Steve’s severe case of lice, after four doses of the lice treatment we were not able to get rid of all the lice. The only solution we had was to cut Steve’s beautiful curly blonde hair because those darn lice really liked his head and just would not leave. Because he was still a foster child in our care we had to get permission to cut his hair from his case worker. It seemed rather foolish that we had to ask but we did anyways. When we explained how severe the lice were and what we had done they agreed to let us cut his hair.
We had a real hard time getting Steve to understand that his toys were his and the bed was his to sleep in not hide under. I think he was not really sure that the toys and beds were really his and not just his to use. We decided to take him to the store and let him pick stickers, blankets and sheets that were just his. We gave him the money to pay for them, he got to carry the bag to the car and we let him decorate his toddler bed with all the stickers he wanted. He was such a great big brother he also picked some things for George’s crib and he also felt the need to help decorate the crib with the stickers as well.
Once we let him create his own bed he began sleeping in it. We still would get up and check on them throughout the night and it was a great relief to see both of our sons asleep in their beds.