First Post

This kid. This is Ruby.

Ruby, age 5, eating a salad...by choice.

She's biologically my husband's sister's kid. My husband, Dustin, and I have been parenting her at least part-time since she was two-and-a-half. It's been a mad roller coaster of fostering, co-parenting, and most recently, legal guardianship. 

In 2011, we didn't have any kids of our own, and we were considering the idea that maybe we just didn't want kids after all. Then, suddenly, heart-wrenchingly, Ruby and her little sister Victoria were removed from the care of their mother and placed in foster care. We were then faced with the huge decision of whether to take them into our home. Honestly, though, it didn't feel like that much of a decision - more like a choice that had been made already, and we just needed to get on board with it. We went to court and told the judge we'd be their foster parents via a "kinship" foster arrangement....and we never looked back. That was in June 2011.

3 years later, what seemed like a tough situation has gotten infinitely more messy and complicated. We really, really love Ruby, but that's much too simple a phrase for what we experience with her. The love of a parent, I've discovered, is so many-faceted. It's a haphazard mishmash of affection and concern and nurturing and doing-the-right-thing and selflessness and courage and empathy. It's not tidy.

It's hard to even know where to start, but I want to tell people. I don't even know why, really, except that it feels like it might help. It might help me to be a better mother, and to better understand our Ruby. It might help other people to see beyond the traditional scope of what parenting is. It might help other adoptive/foster/guardianship/etc parents who wonder what it's like for others in similar situations. 

I've been thinking about blogging for a long time, so I decided to just dive in. Here goes!

The three of us last fall at a pumpkin patch.