Prepared vs Insane

We prefer to think of ourselves as prepared, but the blog has never really shown how prepared we really were.  We can definitely see where outsiders may think we're insane, but it sure was fun buying all of the stuff and knowing it would be used by kids that really needed it.  I took a couple of  pictures of our garage, just to display our preparedness.  In the first picture, you'll see that we have the baby bouncer, the swing, the stroller, and the exersaucer.  The second picture is the clothes that we purchased and were given to prepare for our adventure into fostering.  

The clothes sort of make us look crazy, but hey... you never know what you'll need.  We have them separated into boys/girls and by size.  In some cases, we have them separated into winter/summer as well.  Mostly, we did this as a way to not end up at Wal-Mart at 2am in the event of an overnight placement.  Leonard and Penny came to us with very little clothing, but still more than the average foster placement brings.  It was nice to not have to worry about something they could need immediately, like a coat or some socks.  As I said, the clothes came from a combination of places.  Some of them are out-grown things that belonged to The Kid, some were given to us by one of The Wife's co-workers, and then we bought a lot of it... either from a consignment store or, in some cases, new stuff that was on clearance at kids' stores.  The clothes also help in that, when a child outgrows clothes, we already have the next size ready to go and we don't have to run out and get a bunch of new stuff at the same time.