Some of you have asked when I’ll post pictures of The Cherubs. I’d love to! Once you see them you’ll fall in love. But that’s a ways down the road, for a couple of reasons.

The most obvious is that we’re not allowed. Our status right now is that we’re The Cherubs’ foster/pre-adoptive parents until the adoption is finalized. FP’s are expected to keep pics of the kids off of social media. There are all kinds of good reasons for this – security, privacy, safety, etc. It makes a lot of sense, even though most FP’s I know would LOVE to share the adorableness of the kids they care for.

The second reason is more personal. Because Steve & I are jumping into parenthood so far downstream from where most people enter the water, we’ve given almost NO THOUGHT to how much of our kids’ lives we want to share online. Like everyone, we’ve seen some things that seem like total overshares, and we’ve also been captivated by the cuteness/humor/snark of other pics.  We’re not sure where we fall on this spectrum.

I suspect that we’ll err on the side of caution. Here’s why: children who have been in foster care are just like other kids in so many ways…except that they’ve been in foster care, which is this overlay that impacts everything more than you’d expect. One example is privacy – children in foster care have almost none. Adults they barely know or have never met constantly discuss them, evaluate them, and make decisions about their lives. They’re sometimes moved without notice, their information is occasionally posted in public places to try and find them a forever home, and when an adoptive family is found, there is a HUGE gap between what the parents know about the children and what the children know about the parents.  It is, to put it mildly, weird.

Part of our parenting mission is to help restore to our kids the sense that their lives are their lives, and teach them to manage who knows what (and when, and how).

So for now, I’ll just share this, our first official family picture:

We call it God makes surprising families in unexpected ways :)