Family is in Your Heart

**Spoiler Alert** I am skipping forward.
Once we realized that we most likely would never have children of our own, we decided that we had too much love to share to stay childless. Since we both came from large families (I have 5 siblings and my husband has 8), it just didn't make sense to either of us to sit and mope. We had both known from an early age that we wanted to adopt, my husband at an earlier age than I, but because we are the average American household, we didn't have the finances to do so privately. Also because we were not exposed to others who had adopted, we were unaware of financing or fundraising options.
What we did have was a family in our church who fostered children, and had adopted a few. We approached them with some questions, and they pointed us in the direction of our local county foster agency. This was roughly 5 years ago when received our first packet of information. Honestly overwhelming didn't even begin to describe the paperwork in front of us. Roughly half-way through, we tossed it.
Roughly one year later, we contacted our local office again and signed up for the foster parent training course. We still didn't have our paperwork completed, but we wanted to have more information...Do we foster-adopt? Do we just adopt? What are our chances? What are we REALLY getting into? We had been told that since we didn't have children of our own, we would have a harder time adopting from foster care. Something to the affect of "You haven't proven that you can parent normal children, so the committee or caseworker will wonder if you have it to parent ours." Harsh? Yes, but truthful? I think so? In the end we chose to foster, to gain "experience" and possibly be able to adopt a child that we already have a relationship with.