The author presents journal entries from her first 7 months as a foster parent of a 5-week-old girl in 2000, illustrating how she, her husband, and her birth children wrestled with their emotions and their role as a foster family. Their expectations of themselves as temporary caretakers were reinforced in foster parent training. What the training did not address--and what they underestimated--was the driving need of human beings to attach to one another.