Holidays and support networks

We've been away this week. One of my sons at a camp and the other at a robotics course. We took at trip to Sydney for this. That meant staying with family and catching up with family and friends. It was a lovely week.
One of the friends we caught up with currently has a foster child with them. It was wonderful to be able to catch up with their family and hear how things are going for them, both with regard to fostering and life in general. I imagine relationships with other foster carers will become an important part of our support network in the future.

During our two day interview we spent some time talking about our support networks. The interviewer, Kevin, handed us a piece of paper and asked us to write our names in the middle and then map out our support networks. We asked for a larger piece of paper. It's actually a really interesting thing to do. We started with our extended family. We then added significant local friendships, our slightly further away friends and then we got to our college year, who we ended up adding as a group on the paper, as to write down individual names would have required a much larger piece of paper and a lot of time. This is a hugely significant support network for us. My husband went to college for four years at Moore Theological College. We had a large year. For two years we lived in college accommodation. This is a very deliberate thing on behalf of the college, and it takes some effort to not live residentially for some of the time at college. Most of our closest long term ministry relationships were made during the time we lived in college accommodation, including three out of four of our children's godparents. Three of the four friends we caught up with last week are from this time, including our friends who are doing foster care. Our year group still gets together for a few days together each year (we go every second year). Our kids have developed great relationships with other children from our year group too, even though we don't get to see them all that frequently. We love that they have supportive people around them, both the kids and the adults.

I can't imagine deciding to enter into foster care without having an existing support network. I'm sure some do it. I am incredibly thankful to be entering into this with our support network behind us. Our friends and family have been incredibly supportive of this decision. It will impact on them too, so I am glad they are supportive of us.