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If you truly feel compelled and you and your husband are on board I would look into it. Go into the gathering information stage! Some agencies won't do placements while your pregnant but some will. I remember talking to a social worker with a Foster care agency and he told me that sometimes the answer ins't No it's just Not now. It stuck with me because I really want to do a foster adoption as well but at the time we didn't have enough rooms in our house. So I have kept that mantra in my head. It's just not now but it doesn't mean never.

Look into your state programs and agencies that work with your state. There are a lot of options out there for foster care and good luck!

@MamaBear87: Absolutely. I'll wall you my email.

Am in the process now with DS2. He's been with us for two years, as of next week.

@MamaBear87: with DS1, we just explained that so-and-so was coming to visit with us for a few months. We told him that so-and-so's family was having a hard time, and we were going to take care of him/her. After our first three placements (one of whom is DS2!), DS1 was familiar enough with what was going on that we ask for his opinion (and take it with a grain of salt!) when we receive/d calls for placement.

At first DS1 really just rolled with the punches, but the last child that we fostered left us all needing a longer break. Once DS2 is a year or three older, I think we might try again.

Although we had some amazingly good experiences...we also had some amazingly terrible experiences. It's not for the faint of heart! We've our share of struggles...and are ready for a period of time when we have a break!

@MamaBear87: It's actually what was suggested to us by a great social worker in our fostering classes - I wish I could take credit : ).

In my area, there isn't a foster-to-adopt program for children under age 8 (sometimes even age 10), so in order to adopt, we had to get our foster care license and hope for either a quick reunification or adoption. Being excited/overwhelmed will definitely ebb and flow...and sometimes - at least for me - over the weirdest things. As crazy as it sounds, I wasn't even remotely concerned about bringing home DS2 as a newborn baby with special needs...with NO BABY GEAR at home and only a few hours' notice (I was really excited, though!). Of course, I might have freaked out at least a little if I'd ever actually even held a newborn (DS1 was adopted internationally as a toddler)...but I definitely nearly lost my mind other times that seem pretty inconsequential now.

I was always weirdly calm and efficient at the time of placement...and usually spent the next few days so busy, I didn't have time to worry. By the end of the first week or two, there would almost always be something that I was overwhelmed with/worried about. Sometimes these things were serious (like when we discovered one of our fosters - at age 3.5 was almost completely deaf from what turned out to be sensory-neural hearing loss and had vision problems that required surgical correction - and his family hadn't NOTICED), sometimes it was not life-alteringly serious at all (like the child we had who had never played with toys that weren't cars).