Foster Care Friday: Belongings and Labels

The arrival and departure of a foster child can be crazy. Sometimes the child comes with lots of items or sometimes it's just a few. The child is supposed to come with a "Home to Home" binder (at least in Utah, I don't know about other states). In the binder is a form to fill out recording the items the child comes with. Now with both Emma and Joey I didn't get the binder right away, or at all with Joey. So how do you keep their things straight?

For their clothing I've made my own system of markings. I need to just pick one way and do it on all things, because out of the 5 placements, I've done 3 different things! With Ben, Madison and Isaac I used a sharpie and drew a line on the tags of our clothes we had. All of their clothes they came with or were purchased with their clothing allowance were left un-marked. So when the time came for them to leave I looked at the tags to see what was whos.

I've done similar things for Emma and Joey. With Emma, or Jay as she was, I put a "J" on the tag of her things. Then with Joey I put an "N" (our last name) on our things. From now on I'm sticking to the N on our things so I don't get confussed. But it works wonderfly to keep tract of what clothes are theirs and what stays when/ if they leave!