Mark and Heather Bishop enjoyed sitting on with their newly adopted daughter Emily, 3, and watching Mickey Mouse on a recent weeknight.
"It's a wonderful feeling knowing that she is officially part of our family," said Heather Bishop, 38, a facilities planner. "She was always our daughter."
The Catonsville husband and wife were among a dozen families in Baltimore County to adopt children for whom they had provided foster care, during a special adoption ceremony hosted by Baltimore County in Towson, just before the holidays.
The event, which also featured music, food and balloon animals, was to highlight a continuous need for foster parents.
Last year, 38 children were placed in permanent homes in the county, but 580 children remain in foster care this year, according to a press release from the county's Department of Health and Human Services.
Finding homes for children in foster care is "an ongoing need," said Dr. Gregory William Branch, director of the county Department of Health and Human Services, in the press release.
The Bishops decided they wanted to adopt four years ago. They have been providing a foster home for Emily since just after she was born in 2012. She is the fourth foster child for whom they have provided care.
The first was an infant born with a drug addiction.
"She was only 5 weeks old and she was going through withdrawal symptoms," Heather Bishop said, seated next to her husband at their home in the Paradise community of Catonsville. "So it was really, really hard."
According to Judith Chagrin, assistant director for children's services at the county's Department of Social Services, 69 percent of children 4 and younger enter the foster care system because of substance abuse issues.
"Over 50 percent of children entering care in Baltimore County enter as a result of severe neglect, often associated with mental illness and/or substance abuse," Chagrin wrote in an email.
When she was 9 months old, the girl was adopted by her paternal grandparents.
It was difficult to let go of a child they had bonded with over a period of months, the couple said.
There followed two other foster children, both of whom needed very temporary shelter with the Bishops.
In July 2012, a case worker notified them that then-2-week-old Emily needed a foster home.
Baltimore County, like Maryland's other counties, provides a foster care program, a temporary service that places children in family homes or group homes and offers support services to children unable to live with their biological parents due to neglect or child abuse, according to the Maryland Department of Human Resources.
The number of children in foster care has declined since a peak in 2004, Chagrin said.
"During a hiring freeze that lasted from 2001 to 2004, we had more children enter care because we lost 30 percent of our staff and weren't able to provide services to maintain high risk children in their homes," Chagrin said. "We are hopeful that a different strategy will be implemented rather than a hiring freeze that can be so damaging to children."
The decline cannot be attributed, however, to an increase in adoptions, but rather to an emphasis on keeping children with their families, Chagrin said.
"We're working harder to keep them in their own homes or placing them with their father, who they sometimes have never met," she said.
That push to keep children with their families is part of Maryland's Place Matters initiative, implemented in 2007, to promote: "safety, family strengthening, permanency and community-based services for children and families in the child welfare system," said Maryland Department of Human Services information.
Through the policy, the state says it has been able to reduce the number of children in foster care to the lowest level in 25 years.
"Terminating parents' rights has been rightfully referred to as the 'death sentence' of parenting — a step not to be taken lightly...We need to exhaust every service and support possible before taking that drastic measure," Chagrin said. "It can take several years to exhaust every possible service and support."
That commitment to reuniting children with their biological families was difficult for the Bishops, who said the county continued to test men to find out who Emily's biological father was. They worried that Emily's father, or his family members, would come forward and adopt her.
Now that the adoption is official, the two said it is a comfort to know that Emily will always be their daughter.
"There's no more threat of a birth father popping up and off she goes," Heather Bishop said. "Being a foster parent is a little unknown but it is really rewarding."
The Bishops said they plan to provide foster care to another child.
"After the holidays, we're going to talk about...what kind of child we want to take in," Heather Bishop said.
For those interested in becoming foster parents, the county holds information sessions once a month at the department of health and human services. The next will be Tuesday, Dec. 9, at 6 p.m. at 6401 York Road on the third floor.
For additional information, go to http://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/agencies/socialservices/fosterparenting.