Jeremy and Amanda had talked about foster parenting throughout their 15 years of marriage. Yet having children of their own, managing their farm, working jobs and Amanda’s diagnosis with epilepsy consumed their time and kept them from seriously looking into it, until about a year ago.
After Amanda’s diagnosis, there was a lot of time spent praying. She feels that is when she really felt the pull to foster parent and she asked Jeremy if they could do the STARS training.
“Our main concern with fostering was how it would affect our own children,” says Jeremy. “We told them it would be hard, but we want them to know that we are here to take care of them first and foremost.”
Amanda and Jeremy feel as if God kept putting signs in their lives to point them towards fostering. Among other things, Amanda saw an announcement on Facebook about Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries hosting a STARS training, and then her nurse mentioned that she was signed up to be in Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries’s first STARS class in Columbia, Missouri. These signs and others helped them make the commitment and sign up for the class.
“We got really, really close to the other members in our STARS class,” says Amanda. “We all lean on each other – texting, calling etc. If you commit to fostering, make sure you connect with the people in your training class, because those are the people you’ll be going through this journey with.”
Jeremy and Amanda had just finished their STARS class when they received an email about a young sibling group needing a home. They inquired, waited and kept asking questions, and then decided, ‘If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it. This is why we did all of the training!”
Everything moved quickly after that, with a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy arriving two days later. That very evening, Boone County made the announcement about the stay-at-home orders. Amanda found herself the next morning calling around trying to figure out how to get immunizations and clothing for the children and where to sign them up for preschool while she was working. In spite of a pandemic, everything has worked out.
Within two days, the children were calling Amanda and Jeremy, ‘mom and dad.’
“Since our kids call us mom and dad, they just followed their lead and latched on that,” explains Amanda. “They’ve done it ever since.”
“It’s been important for us to make sure our own children are not trying to play the part of ‘mom and dad’ too much,” continues Amanda. “We remind them that we love their help, we want them to help, but they don’t need to worry about teaching life lessons or consequences or other parental responsibilities. We just want them to be kids…be a big brother and sister. They’ve adjusted so quickly to that!”
“We told our kids it would be hard,” adds Jeremy. “They’ve stepped up and dealt with it. Our kids told them from the beginning that they could call them their brother and sister. They are all doing great.”
“People often tell me, ‘I couldn’t do that – I have older children or I don’t have the patience,” says Amanda. “Many will question us and ask why we’ve decided to do this. I honestly can’t give a logical answer. We both just felt it, and in the right time we knew it was the right thing to do.”
“We’re only a couple months into our first placement,” says Jeremy. “We just take it day by day. We both hope that reunification will be possible, but if it’s not, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
“I don’t believe we really have a right to complain about the foster system unless we’re willing to do something about it,” adds Amanda. “We’re just trying to make things better. We’re not saints for doing this. We just felt the need to help and we followed through with it. Sure, we have rough days when we wonder why in the world we agreed to do this. It’s hard!
“Yet we tell people all the time, ‘you can do this.’ You just need to be willing. We take care of them like they were our own kids and we just take one day at a time. We want to focus on giving them a great life while they are with us. Foster parenting doesn’t have to lead to adoption. You can just be there to help for a season…and you can help LOTS of kids that way.”
