Before we become parents we tend to have some idea of the kind of parent we would like to be. I know that before and during our adoption process I used to watch the way other parents handled situations with their children and wonder how I would have dealt with them. The problem with having these preconceived notions is that things very rarely go the way you plan.
Category: parenthood
Calming the Storm
Patience. It isn’t necessarily a quality I would attribute to myself. Not without some internal effort at least. I can sit and stare at a problem on my computer, methodically looking through hundreds of lines of code, attempting to identify a bug and fix it. It can take seconds, minutes, hours, or sometimes days to do that. I can do this where others may not. This is where my patience holds. I do not have patience with people, at least I never thought so, but occasionally I surprise myself. When patience is the last thing on my mind, but is
Choices
Living with two toddlers has taught us how important the ability to choose for yourself is. How it is not nice to have someone else dictate to you how your life is going to play out. Even at the young age of 2 children are capable of making decisions about their lives. They may not be informed decisions, or even the ones in their own best interests, but they are capable of making them. In fact, in our family at least, it is usually the removal of the ability to make these decisions that lead to the inevitable tantrum, or
The Christmas Quandary
This year will be our second Christmas with our boys but it’ll be our eldest son’s 4th and our youngest’s 3rd in their lifetimes. I don’t think we really appreciated how big a deal a stable Christmas with the extended family and lots of presents was until last year. It was something both my partner and I have always had, so it is the norm for us, for our children though it was not. It started to hit home a little bit with the lack of excitement from our eldest the night before. I know it was only his 3rd
Parenting Cycles
We all do it. We tell ourselves we will never be like our parents, we’ll do things differently, we’ll do things better.
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.
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
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
And so it continues…
A few more observations: 9. Driving on a dual carriageway (highway for those of you across the pond) whilst doing a full family rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (with actions for the non-drivers) is a common occurrence. 10. Replace Twinkle Twinkle with any other nursery rhyme/song and repeat point 9. 11. Associating video with audio from a different source is learnt behaviour, young children just don’t get it. 12. Proper names of parents no longer exist. Forget them and go with the parental titles instead, regardless of whether children are actually present. Unless of course you want to be
And so it begins…
Introductions are over and we are now in full Parental Responsibility mode. Before I say anything about the introductions in general I have a list of observations. 1. Get used to drinking formerly hot drinks cold, or only half of them, or not at all. Certainly get used to searching for randomly placed cups with full or half drunk drinks in them once the children are in bed. 2. Children somehow generate crumbs. Even if they have not had anything to eat, they are just there on the carpet inexplicably. 3. Forbidden things are nectar to children. Nothing is sacred,
