Secrets out! We are adopting a young person! Read for more details.

Hello everyone.

Over the last few weeks, my wife and I and our family have kept a bit of a secret.

The secret is, we're actually adopting a young fellow.

This young fellow is who we're going to call “K”.

At the current point in time, K has been in and out of residences, as well as with different foster families.

I coincidentally bumped into K in a work role.

As soon as I met K, I knew that this was the child I wanted to help.

That day, after meeting K, I went home and tried to convince my wife. She wasn't too on board at the time.

For me, it's always been a dream to adopt a young person.

As someone who had been with a number of different families growing up,

I always knew that fostering was something I wanted to do.

Why am I sharing this with you? I'm sharing this with you because, currently, Australia has a foster care crisis. There are kids living in residences who should not be, and there are families who have children in their care who, honestly, should not.

But this is all due to the carers crisis. I'm hoping by opening up about this, it will lead to a discussion within your family about whether you would have the capacity to accommodate a young person. This process for us is going to be a bit different because I've worked with child safety for a number of years in different roles. The office that this young person came through, I've worked with for about the last eight months, so they know me pretty well. Also, K is in need of emergency housing.

So, our process has been expedited from a three to six-month process to a three-week process. As mentioned above, once I convinced my wife, we decided to care for K temporarily. We looked after him for about a week. We found that he fit really well within our family, and our kids loved him.

That was really important for us because we needed to make sure that our kids felt comfortable around him, and he felt comfortable around them.

We had a meeting with Child Safety, and they accepted our request.

It was a very exciting day.

The next step for us is to have an assessor come to our house just to make sure that everything is safe. Excitingly, this is actually happening this Monday.

The current goal is to have K in our care full time as of this coming Wednesday.

We're over the moon to be able to give this young man such an amazing opportunity, as well as for this young man to allow us into his life.

As I said, I'm going to keep you all in the loop throughout this process, so I'll update you all on Monday about how the house viewing goes, and then on Wednesday when, hopefully, we sign the papers to say that he can come and stay.

If you do have any questions about fostering, please perform a quick Google search or send me a message.

Every single week, I see kids that just need to be loved. The process isn't hard, and it's highly rewarding.

Thank you all for reading, and I will speak to you all Monday afternoon.

P.s a massive thank you to my wife for letting me follow my dreams and supporting me.