Update-ish

Hi!  I've been getting a lot of questions about how court went...which is great because that means 1 - you read my last blog (thank you!) and 2 - you probably said a prayer for the kiddos (thank you!!).  So...I'm updating you to tell you we don't have an update yet :(  We (Dave) had originally planned on going to court (which is allowed, but not required), but were discouraged from going from both their CPS caseworker and ours.  Now that we haven't heard anything, I think if we had to do it over again we would probably go because I'm very curious as to what all was said.  But oh well...we'll learn from this!  I also learned that CPS caseworkers generally always discourage foster parents from going to court cases...because let's be honest, we're just the babysitters, right??  He did however encourage us to go to their permanancy conference, which from what I understand, is more informal and more of a meeting where everyone gets to participate - so Dave could give input if needed.  He said that would be happening soon, but did not give us a date.  He (and by 'he' I'm referring to their CPS caseworker) said that this hearing was really just to talk about birth mom's progress and not to talk about a return yet, or what that would look like.  He did tell Dave at their last visit that he probably wouldn't recommend return until at least February...which we were very relieved to hear.  It also means that it APPEARS that we will have a kid-filled Christmas - yay!  But again...it's foster care, so you should probably just delete that sentence from your memory because ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN :)  So...I did email OUR caseworker and asked her to get a report for us, but that has not been sent to us yet.  If we get that and there is anything to update about, I will certainly let everyone know!!  Thanks so much for caring and for praying and for asking....I really appreciate it!

Also - who told brother that I wrote a blog about her hair getting easier??  Because here is what her hair looked like when I picked them up from daycare the day I wrote that post and according to sister, brother was the culprit:

in case you can't tell, that is sand-like
 dirt and grass all up in there

So...our past 2 evenings have been all about taking out that style, washing, rewashing, parting, and doing a new style.  I had to know this was coming some day - what little kids don't play in dirt??