Kira Cook always knew she wanted to adopt. She decided to foster-to-adopt soon after having a biological child. In this episode she details the difficult reunification of her first foster daughter and how she subsequently found the child that would become a part of her forever family. She talks about the challenges of working with the foster care system, maintaining the birth order between children, her pre-conceived notions about drug exposure and gives advice about how to move forward if someone is interested in pursuing this path.

Ted and Carlos adopted Daniel when he was eight through the foster care system. His parental rights had already been terminated and he'd been through multiple failed placements before arriving in their home. On this special episode, we get to hear from Daniel, himself, about his experiences, as well as chat with Ted and Carlos about the joys and challenges of adopting an older child who has been in the system longer and how they surmounted difficulties through love, patience and perseverance. They talk about the "honeymoon period", behavioral challenges and helping Daniel get off lots of medication. They discuss how they bonded as a family during the pandemic, and "family fun day", a family tradition they developed when they were getting to know each other that they still try to continue today. They also touch on homophobia and how they deal with it, as a family with two dads. Ted is an old friend of mine from my college days of studying in London. I'm thrilled to have had the opportunity to interview him and his beautiful family.

In part two of my initial two "mini-sodes" to kick off this podcast, I interview my husband and best friend, Joe Fulginiti. Joe and I already knew we hit the lottery with our relationship. When we began to struggle with fertility challenges, health issues and carrying a pregnancy, we wondered if we could just be happy being child-free. We did a lot of soul-searching and figured out we still wanted kids. That set us off on a quest for how to do that. We researched many different avenues for starting a family and eventually arrived at the one thing we didn't want to do originally: foster-to-adopt. After so much loss, we were very afraid of getting hurt more, putting all our love, attention and energy into a relationship that could be "taken away". Eventually we figured out the mindset we needed to cultivate and maintain to successfully take the journey, regardless of whatever happened in the end. We learned that what we wanted was secondary, and that our job was to support the child In this episode, we share our story, we talk about mindset and how it evolved, challenges and coping strategies within the foster-to-adopt paradigm, and how lucky and grateful we are to have two amazing children. We briefly discuss neurodiversity, as our daughter is on the Autism spectrum.

In this inaugural episode, I introduce who I am, why I decided to start the show and how my family came to foster-to-adopt. I give a brief background on my career as an actor and then a voice actor and audiobook narrator as well as my relationship with my husband and our surprise struggles to have children. I go on to detail how the intentional building of our forever family unfolded over the past decade. I share other options we explored for starting a family, such as IVF, "straight adoption" through a lawyer, open adoption and surrogacy, and how we vacillated but finally arrived at the tough decision to foster-to-adopt. Other topics include how we prepared for the journey and why we chose to work with a foster family agency, as opposed to going directly through the County. I discuss my fears about saying "yes" to a placement and why I said "no" five times before saying yes, employing some wise advice I received with regards to that. I then talk about what it was like to be in the process of fostering, including some of the challenges and ups and downs as well as the mindset I learned to cultivate. I describe the magic, signs and synchronicities from the universe all along the way that let us know we were on the right track to finding the children meant to join our family, and how it felt to finally arrive at adoption. I also discuss safe surrenders, as my second son was safely surrendered by his birth mom, something we were told never to expect and that rarely ever happens. I am so grateful to be able to bring this show to you, to share my family's story as well as the stories of seven other amazing, happy families in Season One of this podcast. My hope is that it will be informative, inspiring, and educational for all who are interested in this subject, which is very dear to my heart.

This is the trailer for the brand new "From Foster to Forever" podcast. Season One features interviews with a variety of folks who have successfully navigated the foster-to-adopt journey and arrived at forever. Topics discussed include how to handle the ups and downs, dealing with loss, transracial adoption, co-parenting through a divorce, same-sex parenting, being an older parent, adopting an older child, and signs and synchronicities, among many other things.  The show is hosted by award-winning voice actor and audiobook narrator Rachel Fulginiti, who is also a two-time foster-to-adopt mom and foster-to-adopt advocate.