October 6: They are my foster children and I am their foster mom, but foster doesn’t mean fake.

October 7: We are a real, honest-to-goodness family with triumphs, struggles, and so much love.

October 8: The many types of foster care include respite, short-term, long-term, basic, therapeutic, kinship, emergency, and foster-to-adopt, and there are are as many kinds of foster parents as there are parents of non-foster children.

October 10: Here is a bit of history: Years ago, my husband and I decided that any children we brought into our family would arrive via adoption rather than my uterus.

October 11: We have never had any reason to believe we cannot have biological children; we simply knew early on if we were to ever have children, adoption through foster care care was the way we would go about doing it.

October 12: I think the seeds of this decision were planted approximately ten months into our marriage, just about four months after my twentieth birthday, when we suddenly found ourselves becoming the caregivers to two children under three years old.