The Parenting Anxiety

I am a worrier. There are no two ways about it. I am the kind of person that attempts to think through every single scenario of a given situation and come up with a plan to cope with it. I lose sleep over it, I get migraines because of it, I even sometimes end up avoiding the given situation because of some bizarre scenario I have come up with that I can’t find a way of resolving. The more unknowns the worse I am.

Children and Dogs

During our blip one of the minor reasons that was first suggested as to why we wouldn’t be a suitable family for our children was that we had two dogs. For the time being I will ignore the fact that this was stated in our Prospective Adopters Report and that we were initially approached by Social Services about the children and not the other way around.

How About These … ?

One year ago my OH and I had the following text message exchange. The initial message I received when I was driving home from work. OH: Just reading [SW Name] email about sibling group. I don’t know how you feel, but I would like to enquire more about these children. We can discuss it more when I get home, just about to leave off xx Me: Haven’t read it yet, just got to my parents’ house x OH: Ok, the profile sounds promising! xx At this point, I am standing in my parents living room being talked to by my Mum

The Year Gone By

This year has been a pretty amazing roller-coaster of a ride. At the beginning of the year all seemed great; we had our final few assessment sessions ahead of us, our Approval Panel date had been set and we had been approached by social services about a pair of siblings who just seemed perfect. Our Prospective Adopters Report read very well, our social worker got us spot on – the rough and the smooth – and it was on the back of this that we were approached in the first place. We were on Cloud 9; all these tales of

Big Day

Today was the day our home became our youngest child’s longest home. This can be a very significant day for an adopted child. For us though, due to our child’s age, I think today has gone unnoticed. We had the same temper tantrums and, shall we say, “exploring the function of teeth” as we have had over the last few months. No changes in behaviour at all, although we didn’t expect any. I think when the equivalent day for our oldest comes it will be far more significant, but that is some way off.

The Best Present

We have received the best Christmas present anyone ever can this year. We have become the irrefutable, absolute, legal parents of our children. (with no backsies!) Shortly after my post in September, we sent off the Adoption Order paperwork. We hoped that we had managed to get it to the court in time for it to be processed before Christmas, but we expected to be too late. We had been told it should take about 12 weeks, and that took us up to and probably beyond Christmas. A couple of weeks later we received a letter from the court telling

Life Story Books

Here’s a post I promised a couple of months ago about what are called Life Story Books. Somewhere along the line ‘the powers that be’ found rather than concealing a child had been adopted, treating it as a taboo subject, as if it were something to be ashamed of, that if someone knows where they came from and why they are better able to become well-rounded individuals. One of the things which social services are now obligated to do to help with this is to provide every adopted child a Life Story Book. So what are they? They are a

The Road So Far…

In the grand scheme of things our journey and travels through the adoption process have been quite short. Many prospective adopters wait a lot longer to be linked to a child than we did. Many people have delays caused by problems with social services staffing issues, and sometimes prospective adopters get assigned a social worker to assess them that they just don’t feel comfortable with. Occasionally social workers make mistakes which delay things – they are human, they make mistakes – and sometimes Life just gets in the way. I am pleased to say we have experienced very few of those of things and