I have been busy since February. In March I had the pleasure to attend a Families Together Retreat in Hays, Ks. Driving in a spring blizzard to get there wasn't fun, but the actual parent weekend was very good. I met other parents with special needs children and found out that everyone gets frustrated at times trying to be sure that our kids get the services they need and deserve.
Last week I attended a Children's Alliance sponsored training called Home With a Heart, a training that focuses on the relationship between a couple and how that is affected when a child comes into the home. It was excellent, and it really had me thinking about our own family and the dynamics and interactions, and how I personally could work to make it even better.
Yesterday I went to Independence Ks for our quarterly board meeting. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, the wind wasn't blowing for a change, and it was in the mid 60s. So I enjoyed the three hour drive to and from the meeting, even driving through the haze and smoke from the fields in the Flint Hills as they were doing spring burning.

We are very excited about the Walk Me Home event that will be on May 23 in Concordia, KS. Co-sponsored by the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, it will be a great day for Kansans to come together and show their support for families caring for other children. Our plans are to go to Concordia the day before and camp - the airport has free camping hookups!

KFAPA is also working on a parent summit that will be held in July, where we will bring together representative families from a variety of the agencies, to talk about what is going well, what isn't going well, what recommendations there are for change.

We will have a camp-out in June outside of Lawrence for our Election meeting, where we count the ballots for our new board, who will take office July 1. Lots of stuff going on!

We will have information about all these events on our home page shortly and hope that we have a substantial number of families signing up to participate.

RAPP in Kansas

Tuesday I went to the RAPP meeting in Topeka. RAPP is the Relatives as Parents Program. This program supports relatives raising their relatives' children, especially the grandparents who are raising their grandchildren. We had a great discussion about how traumatic it can be for grandparents to suddenly become responsible for a newborn, an infant, toddler, preschooler, adolescent, whatever age. To sudden move from grandparent to primary caregiver is quite a challenge. To have to round up necessary furniture, clothing, food, arrange for medical care, etc. and still maintain the regular daily activities such as jobs, is even more of a challenge. Grandparents, or even aunts, uncles and other relatives, who undertake the care of the relative's children, are often faced with even more of a challenge. They may take in the child, or children, to keep them out of the "system". Yet they may need to apply to the "system" for assistance. A very young child may benefit from WIC programs, HeadStart, Early Childhood Development programs, may need Medicaid. To access these services when the grandparent is not the legal guardian must be even more of a challenge. If you know of anyone who is caring for a relative's children, encourage them to get support and information about resources from the RAPP program.

Parent Training

On January 27 I attended a training in Topeka called "Shared Parenting to Help Children in Foster Care Manage Their Anger". It was a great training. The next day, I attended the training "Beyond Consequences: A Love Based Approach to Helping Children with Severe Behavior". It was better than the great training of the day before. I have books to read to go along with the training. Both trainings were by Kim Combes from Iowa, and he was interesting, informative, not boring at all, and is not only a therapist/counselor but a foster and adoptive parent. So he has had the experiences with the kids, and he can talk firsthand about what works and what doesn't. Now I have to put this into practice at home. It isn't easy to change the way a person automatically responds to stress, or crisis, or unpleasantness. However, the incentive to make the change is that we will see a change in the behaviors of our children. And that right there will make it worth the effort. Of course, I expect that our son, who will be the guinea pig of sorts as we change the way we respond to his behaviors, will be thrown out of whack for a while. But as we told him, we're in this together and we will get through it. We'll try to keep you posted.

Children's Alliance Training On Dealing with Anger

Today I was in Topeka for the Children's Alliance Training Committee monthly meeting (Christmas potluck). I have been on this committee for over a year, and I am monthly reminded of the dedication that the child welfare system of Kansas has to ensuring that the foster and adoptive families receive the training that they both need and want. The Children's Alliance helps the child placement agencies receive trainer training so that agency workers can go forth and provide training to the families. They do trainings for workers as well. Today we worked on setting up a Training of Trainers to address anger. This is in direct response to a needs assessment where families told us they need and want training to handle behavior issues with the children in their care. I am excited about this training, as it will provide families with some concrete ways to address anger, learn strategies to redirect or channel anger in positive ways, and will address anger issues that parents exhibit as well.

We got a draft manual to read over, which I will do during the holidays. Then we will attend the training in January, and hopefully be able to offer the training to families shortly afterwards.

I like knowing that we are addressing a specific need that families identified. The system works when people speak up. When no one speaks up and identifies issues or problems, change can't happen.

Find My Family

Last week we watched a new television show called Find My Family. This show will help adopted people located their biological families. I had mixed feelings about this, and I wanted to watch to see how the show handled things. As the adoptive parents of 3 children, we know what it is like for our children to grow up and wonder who their birth families are. They do have a different sense of identity than people who grow up in their biological families. We have always told them to be careful not to be too idealistic about their birth families so they would not be disappointed if they ever established a connection.

Watching this show was interesting. Some of the staff of the show stated that they were adopted. The show did point out that adopted individuals do seem to have a need to know where they came from. In a thirty minute show, it isn't possible to really show a reintegration. It seemed to move from "I want to find my family" to "guess what, we've found your family" to "we're all meeting together and everything is going to be wonderful".

We have actually located some of the biological family of our oldest two children. We have not met them in person. Our children have not been receptive to that, although they appreciated having answers to some of the questions about their infant years. For the birth family, it was instant "we want to meet them, we want to talk to them, we want them to meet their family". For our boys, we are their family, these birth family folks are strangers. Some day, perhaps there will be a meeting.

For now, we will continue to watch this show, with an open mind. For those people who do locate their birth families, we wish them luck in establishing a positive relationship with that birth family without sacrificing the relationship with their true family: the people who raised them, parented them, supported them, provided for them, and loved them. Everyone deserves the right to know where they came from, if they really want to know.

Technology

I attended the 33rd Annual Governor's Conference for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect in Topeka on November 5-6. Actually we had an exhibit, I participated in one of the panel presentations, and I moderated a couple of the sessions. The sessions I attended were all excellent. I learned about Individual Justice Plans, which was very interesting. I also learned that I am way behind modern technology. I attended a session about media opportunities for non-profit organizations. There was talk about FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogs, and all the things that people do now to communicate. Indeed, several people were actually twittering at the conference and receiving comments back from people who read their postings.

I think back to when I was growing up. We didn't even have hand held phones, let alone cell phones and computers. We heard music on the radio, not on iPods and MP3 players. We typed our research papers on typewriters, and we actually went to the library to do research from books, not from Internet websites. I wonder how today's kids would survive if they had to spend a 24 hour period without modern technology.

While it is sometimes frustrating that I don't understand all this stuff like the kids do, I also appreciate the advantages presented by modern technology. We have instant access to information, and we can exchange information instantly. That is a great advantage when there is an emergency, such as a missing child.

I resolved to try to be more frequent in these postings. The conference workshop reinforced that people really do utilize the technology available as a way to communicate, to advertise, and to share and exchange information. Sometimes I just think we should go sit on the back porch and watch the sun go down as a family instead of being connected to the Internet.

To BLog or Not To Blog!

I have real trouble with the computer technology of today. We finally got high speed Internet, which I thought would make it easier to keep up on things like blogging. But now everybody is doing twittering, whatever that is. And everyone has FaceBook pages where they talk back and forth. I don't know how to do any of that, I am just learning about blogging. Days go by quickly and I realize it has been months, not weeks, since my last blog. I will try to do better.

Being involved with a non-profit organization about foster care and adoption is quite a challenge. We are a totally volunteer staff. Most of us have other jobs, plus children, families and other resopnsibilities. It is hard to keep up with all of that. Yet we are committed to working with the child welfare system to ensure that children and families are kept safe.

At the Kansas Foster & Adoptive Parent Association, we want to be sure that the foster, adoptive and kinship families involved in the Kansas child welfare system are included in decisions about children and families. We work hard to be involved with the state's activities in this area. Our state is not as large as some, but even divided into five regions, it's still a lot of territory to cover. We have five regional vice presidents, and the vice president for Region 4 is especially challenged to cover the entire western half of the state.

We are constantly working to increased our membership, to be sure that we have families involved from all the different regions of our state. That is important because we have learned that the issues in Kansas City are very different indeed from the issues in places like Colby, Garden City, Liberal, and even the little community of Canton where I live.

Familes ask frequently "What can KFAPA do for me?" Really, the question should be "What can I do to help KFAPA?" This association represents the foster, adoptive and kinship families of the state. We work with the executive levels of agencies like SRS and KDHE, that make the policies that govern the child welfare system. Those agencies ask our association for input whenever they want input from "the families". KFAPA then contacts our members, asking for their input, and relaying that input back to the agencies. I have heard people say "They don't really want to know, they are just asking to look good."

For the past two years, I have sat in on meetings with these agencies, reviewing policies and licensing standards etc. I can assure you that they aren't just asking to look good. The input that the agencies receive is carefully weighed and considered. We've all heard the old saying "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". It is true. We hear often that we should contact our congressmen about issues, because the more people they hear from, the more consideration is given to the vote. It is true there and it is true here.

How can you make a difference? I am making a difference (or trying to) by being involved with KFAPA and serving on the board. We want families to contact us, both when there is an issue of concern and when there is something going right. Most of the committees that we have require very little time and effort. Most of the work can be done by emails and phone calls, rather than in person. In today's technologically advanced age, it is so simple to participate.

Look us up at KFAPA.org. Contact us. Join. Let's all work together for the children and families of Kansas.