Anita and Tyce's Foster Care Journey

  -Tyce For me, one of the scariest things about becoming a foster parent is that I have practically zero experience with small children. I grew up as the youngest child and my cousins were all about the same age. I have two nephews now, but their baby years were while I was still single so I was never called upon to take care of them. When given the opportunity to hold small children I would usually only do so briefly (carefully aiming them away from myself) or decline altogether. You might t h ink that my years of being a cadet counselor would help, but I don’t take much comfort in it. For one thing, cadets are usually 9 to 14 year-olds which is a completely different set of problems from the infants and toddlers we are getting licensed for. At cadets they are in my charge for only a short period of time and there are always other counselors around. We like to let boys be boys. That means they can roughhouse as long as no one is crying. They can poke the fire with sticks as long ...

 -Tyce Anita has been the primary driver of making sure that we have all of the stuff that we need to take care of foster children. As soon as we made the decision to pursue this, she was thinking about what we may need and looking on Facebook Marketplace for deals. I am exceptionally happy about this, because if it were left up to me there would probably be a lot of midnight runs to Meijer or Wal-mart for things that it would never occur to me that we would need. Booster seats when I was a kid. One of the   first things that she looked into was car seats. I grew up before car seats for children was a thing. The only one I ever used was a plastic “restaurant style” booter seat designed for kitchen chairs, and we only used it so that I could sit high enough to see out the window. Our cars only had lap belts anyway, and if you actually used the belt then you were a sitting duck for the random aggressions of a certain older brother (you know who you are, and yes, I probably deser...

  -Anita Where did our story begin? Maybe it was this past April on our 10th wedding anniversary when I prop o sed watching the movie Instant Family with the hope of starting a conversation? Or maybe in May of 2019 when friends invited us to a foster care info night at their church. But really I think there was always this possibility even back when we were dating. You see we discussed way back then (like you do) how many kids did we want (Tyce wanted 8 girls!!!) What if (because we weren’t 20 anymore) we couldn’t have our own, would we adopt? Would we do fertility treatments? We both came down on the Adoption side, knowing that there are thousands of children out there who need a loving home and if God didn’t give us our own kiddos then maybe He had plans for us to love someone else’s. Honestly I don’t think fostering entered the discussion, yet here we are. Haha. Well, it’s been 10 years of marriage. Good times, tough times. We settled into our nice comfy rut doing our own thing ...