Foster Care: getting the room ready

It's been quite awhile since I've blogged over here and I kinda miss it.  I didn't miss it for a long time. Life is so busy that this was one thing that I had to let go of in this season of life.  It's fun for me but it was also just one more thing to do.  But now that we are going to be doing foster care, my goal is to blog along the way not only to document things but also to inform all of you of what foster care really looks like.  The good, bad and the ugly.  Foster care gets such a bad rep and all you ever hear about are all the out of control kids and bad behaving teenagers etc.  I hope to shed some light on the other side of foster care and show you all what it's really like.  I'm not going to sugar coat it though either.  We know it won't be all rainbows and stars.  It's going to be hard.  But it's gonna be worth it.  God has called us to this and even though we know we aren't anything special, we know He will equip us what what we need as we go.  

So I heard from the supervisor that is reviewing our home study and she said she has 3 other home studies to approve before ours so it's looking like we will be approved and then licensed beginning of next week!!!!!  

So since we could potentially get a call the day we get licensed, we've been getting ready for awhile now and the nursery is officially done and ready for our first placement!  So I thought I'd show you all what it looks like.  When trying to figure out how I wanted to decorate it to not only be gender neutral but also for a foster placement and of course cheap or free, so I did a lot of searching for foster rooms on Pinterest to get ideas.   I found quite a few free printables, I used frames that I had on hand and painted them white, changed up the curtains a little, painted a dresser white and used it as the changing table and got creative with storage solutions.  Here is how it turned out...

I love how this collage turned out!  And even better, it was free!  I had all these frames already and the prints I searched high and low on pinterest for and they were all free printables.  But I didn't just find free printables and that was it, I carefully chose each one specifically for this room.  

And here is the finished dresser/changing table, I absolutely love how it turned out.

(the pictures of Dietrich will be replaced with pictures of the child)

Because we live in a split level home, we have a grand total of ZERO storage. So this closet has many functions.  Right now it has all of Dietrichs hanging clothes, a dresser for storage of baby items that we may need on a short notice once we get a placement, several sizes of diapers, extra blankets, and this is even where we have to store our luggage when it's not being used and up on the top shelf is my wedding dress all boxed up! We make it work :)

So there is the room!  All we need is a 0-2 year old to come stay in it!  We truly cannot wait to start this journey and I hope you all follow along as we wade these unknown waters and bring you along for the journey!