Headed to Florida

In case you haven't heard, we're leaving the D.C. area and moving to Tallahassee this summer. For all but our closest friends, this may have come as a surprise. It may seem like this was a sudden decision, but it has actually been brewing for the last couple years. And it all comes back to foster parenting.

If you'll recall, we started the process of becoming foster parents in Fairfax County way back in 2015. I won't rehash the entire story, but over the proceeding four years, we had a grand total of four calls and one placement. Four calls in four years. It was really feeling like Fairfax just didn't need us (which is a wonderful problem for Fairfax to have, by the way).

So in the summer of 2019, we prayed and decided: We wouldn't keep up with the requirements to keep our license current, and if we never got another placement by the time our license was set to expire, we would just let it go and count it as a word from God that we're supposed to move out of Fairfax. But we weren't in danger of losing our license until the end of the following year, 2020, when our background checks would need refreshing. Or at least that's what we thought.

A few months after our prayer, we got an email from a woman saying, "Hi, I'm your new social worker." Then a few weeks later from Ms. New Social Worker: "Hi Jack and Beth, due to a change in policy, we're going to need to renew your license soon. Please go get all these documents notarized and returned to us as soon as possible." (I'm lightly paraphrasing her in this story, though she did call me Jack.)

Us: Uh, ok -- how soon? What is this new policy?

Her: Soon. New policy. Thanks!

Even though we had decided not to renew our license, this blindsided us a year earlier than expected, so we ended up sending her all the requested documentation. Long story short, she gets back to us a few weeks later (Jan. 2020 at this point) and tells us, "thanks for sending -- unfortunately the background checks did not come back in time, and if you want to continue to be foster parents at this time then you'll have to basically start over."

We requested a meeting with her supervisor to figure out what the heck just happened. Ms. Supervisor, after trying unsuccessfully to explain to us the "new policy" (and probably realizing she didn't understand it herself), finally just said, basically, they screwed up and they're sorry but there's nothing they can do.*

As frustrating as all that was, it was also relieving to have an answer so much faster than we expected. It was pretty clear to us that God was uprooting us and preparing us to leave Fairfax -- except for one minor detail. In the same week we found out our license expired, we got another very surprising surprise: we were pregnant!

(I promise I'm trying to keep this as short as possible. I'm almost to the part about moving to Florida.)

Well if you know anything about Beth, you know she's a nester. So the moment she finds out she's pregnant, she's like, I already have a comfortable home and a nursery set up -- I'm not going anywhere! This was fortunate in that it gave us a season of knowing we were supposed to leave, but not in a big rush to decide where we were supposed to go.

Then shortly after all this, our friend Covid came to town. As awful as it was, there was one huge silver lining for us: it allowed me to work remotely. With my career in SEC financial reporting, I was stuck living in a few big cities where public companies have their corporate offices. But no longer.

So the combination of all these circumstances opened us up to living literally anywhere in the country, and we had at least a year to think about it. Our two biggest factors ended up being 1) are there family and/or friends nearby, and 2) is there a need for foster parenting? This narrowed our choices to northern California, Richmond, or Tallahassee, and ultimately, after much prayer, we settled on Tallahassee. 

We are excited to have built-in community, thanks to Beth's past life there (it's hard to make new friends at this age). We are excited to be near family and for Zoe to grow up with her cousin Elliot. And we are excited to become foster parents again! Nervously excited, that is -- just like before. Inside sources says we should expect slightly more than one call per year. More like one per week, at least.

So...that's where we'll be in t-minus one month! We've already bought a fixer-upper, so once that is fixered-up (and once Zoe stops needing Beth's and my undivided attention for 23.9 hours per day), we're going to jump back into the licensing process. Life is gonna get real, fast...

*The new policy, as best we can understand, was a statewide change in the due dates for background checks. Somehow, thanks to the unusual timing our original background checks, we got lost in some bermuda triangle of bureaucracy. By the time they realized this and notified us about the changes, it was far too late for us to do anything about it.