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Amy Etzell is known for stretching her limits, both physically and emotionally. She has spent her days fostering peace and tranquility in the lives of 300 of her yoga clients at HeartWork Yoga Studio, and has also fostered love in the lives of foster children for an astounding 11 years.

Parenting and Foster Parenting

At the time they started their own family with the birth of their first child, Taylor, Amy and Mark Etzell had friends who were foster parenting six teenage boys. As a favor to their friends, Mark and Amy became licensed foster parents to assist them with their foster children when they needed to travel or have a weekend getaway at their cabin. What started as a friendly favor turned into 11 dedicated years of foster parenting.

After becoming licensed foster care providers, the Etzells quickly realized the desperate need for foster parents in their area.

“We got our foster care license on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday we got a call to take our first foster child, who was supposed to stay three days, and she stayed for three years,” Amy says with a satisfied smile. “For 11 years, we never went a day without a foster child in our house. For five of those years we had seven kids in our home.”

The arrangement with the first foster child went so well, that Amy and her husband continued opening their home to 84 foster children from 1995 through 2006. Foster children, ranging in age from infants to teens, arrived with some staying for as little as 72 hours and others staying for as long as three years. The couple would generally take in foster children that were in the same age group as their own children, so in the later years of foster parenting, they mainly took in teenagers.

“It worked well that both of us were interested in foster parenting,” Amy says of the decision by the couple to take on this amazing challenge. “It really does take both parents. These are children that will be in your family and this is their chance at being children.”

Amy attributes their ability to easily acclimate themselves to raising foster children to the fact that she and her husband both come from large families. Living in the country also helped by allowing the foster children the freedom to explore, ride bikes and horses, and play on outside equipment. Their family dogs, Amy says, also welcomed each new arrival and helped the children become immediately comfortable in their new surroundings.

Everyone knows that moms can multi-task with the best of them, but Amy clearly has a special gift. She says that having a set family schedule not only helped her manage all of her daily responsibilities, but also helped the foster children adapt to their new environment more readily. The Etzell children also openly welcomed these children into their lives. The Etzell’s youngest, Eric, would give each new foster child a tour of their home.

“At one time, my daughter told me to call the county and ask for more babies. We just love babies she would say,” Amy says after recalling the memory. “My son, the only boy and baby of the family, would show the foster kids around and say, ‘here’s all the toys you can play with and here’s the bikes,’ all the while pointing to his own toys.”

Naturally, out of 84 foster children, there were bound to be a few challenges along the way. At the Etzell home, the children were assured a loving environment where they could count on receiving life’s necessities that so many take for granted.

“In our home, their basic needs were met, something they hadn’t had in awhile,” she says. “The foster kids were guaranteed food everyday, a safe place to live and there were no unknowns.”

Of course, there were times when it was difficult to say goodbye when a foster child’s stay was coming to an end. The Etzells overcame that by looking at it as though they were taking care of a relative’s child.

“Overall, we always looked at foster care like we were taking care of our nieces and nephews,” Amy says. “You take care of them like they’re your own family, but yet you know in the back of your mind that it’s not permanent. You kind of have to have that mindset, otherwise your heart gets broken every time.”

The children came in all shapes and sizes with varied backgrounds, including a 14-year-old teenage mother and her newborn baby who also stayed with the Etzells. Fostering children from a multitude of backgrounds and home environments was an eye-opening experience for the family. Amy also feels the experience educated her own children on the consequences of dealing with a difficult path, such as becoming a young teenage mother.

“Out of all of our 84 foster kids in those 11 years, there was only one dad involved in all that time,” says Amy. “We felt we were responsible to giving these kids good memories, and offering them a good childhood. All of the kids that came to our house were really good kids, they just needed some normalcy in their life.”

Building a Business

While Amy was juggling her parental duties and her foster care responsibilities, she also was forging her career in the fitness field. After becoming a yoga instructor at a local fitness club, Amy quickly moved up to director of fitness programming. Childcare was offered at this particular fitness club, so she could bring seven children to work with her, allowing her to focus on her career.

“At this point in our lives, we had five car seats in our car for a total of five years,” she says. Mark and Amy deliberately shifted their work schedules so that this was the only time the Etzell’s four biological children and three foster children attended childcare while Amy taught fitness classes.

In 2002, Amy made a career move and accepted a position as a yoga instructor at HeartWork Yoga Studio, later taking over ownership of the business. Located in the lowest level of a historic downtown building in Northfield, Minnesota, the studio offers a serene, peaceful atmosphere offering yoga clients a respite from daily stressors.

Yoga became a way of life for fit and energetic Amy and its teachings of peace and serenity also helped her during the most stressful periods of mothering her brood and fostering those 84 children.

Publishing

While Amy was balancing foster parenting, parenting and growing her yoga studio business, she found she wanted to express more one-on-one sentiments with her own children.

What started as a simple spiral notebook going back and forth between Amy and her daughter, Taylor, ended up to be a published journal for busy parents. In the notebook, Amy would write an entry and leave it on her daughter’s pillow at night, the next day her daughter would do the same. Back and forth they went, sharing their dreams, worries and words of encouragement. Once while Taylor was journaling a note back to her mom she wrote on its cover, “Back and Forth Journal,” which started Amy thinking. The tattered and fraying notebook prompted Amy to create a hardcover journal, spiral bound on the inside, filled with lined pages meant to aide the communication between parents and their children.

So in 2005, when her daughter Taylor was in eighth grade, Amy designed and published the Back & Forth Journal. To date, Amy has sold 2,500 journals through her website at www.backandforthjournal.com. She has heard countless success stories from customers trumpeting its usefulness and connectivity to include one mother of a college-aged student who mailed her Back & Forth Journal to her college-bound child and promised to send it back with money enclosed if it was returned – a bribe of sorts to encourage the ongoing communication. It worked like a charm!

At one point when the Etzells were foster parenting three siblings, Amy gave their mother, who was in a shelter for battered women, three journals to keep the mother-child bond intact. The journaling process was such a success for this family, Amy decided to donate Back & Forth Journals to all the women at the shelter.

“As parents the time raising our children goes so quickly,” she says. “When we write in the journal we capture snapshots of our children’s lives that we can go back to when they are older to remember the moments that touched our hearts. We do this frequently in our house, the kids open their old Back and Forth Journals and laugh and remember times from years gone by.”

Amy has kept all of her original notebook journals complete with her children’s hopes and dreams jotted on the pages – a treasure of the mother-child communication that was so important during those harried years of parenting, foster care and building her business.

What’s Next for Amy …

After lengthy consideration, the Etzells initially froze their foster parenting license, which has since expired, in order to focus on her children’s busy lives. The Etzell children – Taylor, 17, Ellie, 13, Meg, 12, and Eric, 10 – are receiving Mark and Amy’s undivided attention these days. Even though things have quieted within the Etzell household, the Back & Forth Journals are still passing to and fro, recording each other’s thoughts and memories of those years spent selflessly providing care to children who needed it most.