Being Dad to Adopted Siblings

From the start of our adoption journey we always said we would like to adopt two children. At one point when we were looking at profiles of the children in care we saw many single children who we thought we would be good parents for. At that point we started to realise that if we did adopt a single child we would then want to go through the process again so we could have another. We envisaged our family as a family of four. As things turned out we were approached by social services about two brothers and six months

Favourites

Is it just my children that don’t really have favourite things? They have ‘transient’ favourites certainly, where the thing they’re playing with at the time is their ‘favourite toy’ if asked, but generally they have never had that one thing that they gravitate back to, or can’t live without. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is a massive problem. I’ve seen parents of children who are too attached to a blankee or particular toy with panic in their eyes as their little one is having a minor meltdown because 5 minutes ago they dropped it on the floor

Conversations with a pre-verbal child

Before I write this post I would like to point out that I’m not mad, while these conversations are based on real events they never actually happened anywhere other than in my head. The Request Child: That looks interesting. *points to age inappropriate object out of reach* Parent: No, you can’t have that. Child: Can I have that please? *points again, moves closer* Parent: No, that’s not for you. *moves child away from object and next to some toys in attempt to distract* Child: I want that toy! *returns to object, points again* Parent: That isn’t a toy, you can’t have it.

It’s been a while, but here we are…

So, for some reason I’ve been a bit busy for writing blog posts. This isn’t just adoption related but work related too as (don’t tell anyone but…) a lot of my posts are actually written on my work computer. We are currently on the cusp of sending off our adoption paperwork so that the court can decide whether to change us from ‘Prospective Adoptive Parents’ to ‘Adoptive Parents’. There are quite a few differences between the two, mostly legal, but at that point we no longer need to deal with social services unless we want to. We would contact their

Linked

Let me rewind a few weeks back to before we were approved and when I wrote this: Connections. In it I wrote “Our social worker has also provided some information about another sibling group and that too sounds promising” but I haven’t mentioned anything since. The reason I hadn’t was because those children hadn’t yet been given a Placement Order meaning that they couldn’t be adopted but only kept in foster care until such time as they got one, which may not ever happen. We were approached by these siblings’ family finder social worker rather than the other way around,

Connections

It has been about 2 weeks since my last post and of the three things that I said we expected to happen in that time have happened. For the most part at least. We received the draft copy of the PAR. For those of you unfamiliar with what a PAR is, it is basically all the information that our social worker has gleaned from us and our references since the assessment process began written up into a report. We don’t get to see what our references have said about us only what we’ve said about ourselves and what has been

Sleepless Thoughts

I had a night of no sleep whatsoever, too many thoughts of adoption keeping me awake! The books I ordered arrived yesterday, and reading through some of the stories in them it occurred to me that there is very little material on the new two stage adoption process which got implemented last year. So I thought I’d go back a step and describe what we’ve done so far. We had talked about having children pretty much right from the beginning of our relationship, and 2014 was the year we had decided we would start looking into it properly. I found