Skip to main content
Various & Sundry

Our 2024 tilt-a-whirl adventure in foster care

By September 4, 2024No Comments

Or, why things have been a little quiet around here (but extra loud at home).


In the words of Inigo Montoya, there is too much to explain, so let me sum up. On June 4, 2024, the Sides household grew from five members to seven. My wife, Lindsey, and I said yes to an uber-last-minute, utterly-unlooked-for foster placement of two siblings, a 6-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl. Chaos ensued. If you’re a subscriber to my Substack newsletter, you already know this. If you aren’t a subscriber, this explains why there hasn’t been a formal post on this here website since May.

This is not to say that I haven’t been writing. I have posted a few updates on my Substack over the summer—here, here, and here. These posts will give you the longer story and paint a somewhat comprehensive picture about where we’ve been and how things are going.

Moving forward, the best way to keep tabs is to subscribe to my newsletter. On top of five kids and a marriage and a home and a job, managing all of the things that come your way on the tilt-a-whirl ride that is foster care can really put a premium on time and energy. so it’s just easier and faster for me to get some thoughts out on Substack and not have to mess with creating a post on this site and then crafting an email, etc. (I’m swamped!)

For the foreseeable future, all foster care-related updates will be posted to Substack. My goal is to update this entry once a new update has been posted—letting it serve as a running tab, so to speak, so that non-subscribers are not left out of the loop.

Thanks, as always, for reading.