Hi, I’m Audra — welcome to The Considered Collective.
I’m a mom of five, and this summer I’m moving my youngest daughter into a college dorm. It’s the closest thing to an empty nest we’ll ever have — our son will be home with us for the foreseeable future, and honestly, that in-between place is part of what I want to write about. The house is getting quieter, but not quiet. The season is changing, but not the way the books describe it. Somewhere between the packing lists and this new shape of home, I realized how much I’ve gathered along the way that’s worth passing on.
A big piece of that is foster care. I spent twelve years as a licensed foster parent, welcomed over a hundred children into our home, worked on staff at a foster care agency, and taught MAPP classes for families just starting that same journey. I’m also an adoptive mom to a son with special needs, so I know both sides of this road — the paperwork and the heart of it. Honest, experienced guidance was hard to find when I needed it most, and it’s the reason I started The Foster Family Collective: state-by-state roadmaps, placement binders, and planning tools built from what I actually wish someone had handed me before our first home study. If you’re just starting out, or you’re a few placements in and still feeling like you’re improvising, that’s the shop built for you.
Some of what I share is more everyday practical — what to actually pack for a dorm, how to keep a household of seven organized, which products earn their keep and which don’t. And some of it is the stuff of this next chapter — nutrition and wellness in midlife, menopause, and a marriage that’s about to get a lot more one-on-one time than it’s had in decades. That side of things lives here, at The Considered Collective, in the journals and planners I design to help make sense of it all.
So that’s what you’ll find across both spaces: a little of everything I’ve lived. Product roundups with no filler, hard-won parenting, foster care, and adoption knowledge, and honest notes from a nest that’s emptying — but never quite empty.
When I’m not writing here, I run a small accounting firm with my husband, and I design printable planners, journals, and foster care resources — you can find the wellness and lifestyle side in my Etsy shop, The Considered Collective, and the foster care roadmaps and binders in my other shop, The Foster Family Collective.
Thanks for being here. Whatever season you’re in — a full house, a launching one, a foster placement that just came through, or the quiet after — I hope something here helps.