It was a weird night to begin with. Willow, who consistently goes down around 7:45, wouldn’t stop crying. She wasn’t sick or teething and there was nothing ‘wrong’ - she was just wide awake. We both went in countless times over the course of an hour to comfort her, and finally we gave up and just got her out of bed. She toddled around the living room, completely exhausted and very uncoordinated, but still not wanting to go to sleep. It wasn’t until about 9:45 that we finally put her back in bed and, after a little crying, she gave up.

Not 5 minutes later my phone started buzzing and I saw it was our social worker. I quickly showed Nathan and we knew what it meant - a placement call was coming. It wasn’t our first call, but it was definitely later than we expected!

She explained the situation to us. There was a middle school aged boy who needed a home for just one night. We were the last people she called, since we had decided during the process that the oldest child we would be open to right now is elementary school aged. This is for a lot of different reasons which I won’t get into here, but she knew she was asking a bit more of us than she wanted…