A first but third birthday

Child 4 celebrated his third birthday recently, I don't know if you remember but the first time he met his new siblings was on his second birthday, so for us his birthday was always going to hold special meaning. We started the day with presents, something we kept low key last year as we didn't want him to associate presents and cakes with change. In reality a three year old doesn't need much especially one who has three siblings worth of toys stashed in the attic. Of course our farm loving little man needed a farm, his fantastic throwing arm loved the beanbags and the bubble monster chortled when he opened the bubble machine then there were the books, the cars, the real football and goal net and the tractor and trailer from friends, family and god parents.

After a breakfast of chocolate brioche, well it was a birthday, we let off the blue balloon just like his birth mum hopefully would. It was a beautiful September morning, the kind of end of Summer, beginning of Autumn morning that you read about in a book or a poem, we all piled into the garden high on our hill surrounded by a sea of mist which gradually disperses as the sun warms up, and eventually child 4 let go of his balloon and we watch it float above the laden apple tree, past the roofs of the neighbouring homes and then up heading for the clouds. Next year I will remember to buy two, one to let off and the other to keep.

Then off to mass, where the whole community wished him a happy birthday, home for a speedy lunch before the farm themed birthday party began. We filled the garden with farm style activities, a dozen bright pink balloons adorned with pig faces needing catching and returning to their "dog crate", the bean bag sheep needing to be herded into a hoop, treasure hidden in the bucket of corn, hunting for the chicken's missing kinder eggs and the planting of daffodils into pots to take home to get nurtured until spring. Then a party tea of pigs in blankets, cheese savouries masquerading as chicken feed, vegetable sticks planted in houmous, animal decorated cup cakes and the piece de resistance a pigs in mud birthday cake.

Once his little friends had headed home the after party began with the popping of fizz bottles not just a birthday celebration but an anniversary celebration, it's almost a year since we became a family of six. Would I change anything? Absolutely not!

Grieving but not for a bereavement

Woman's Hour this week had a discussion about fostering and the splitting up of sibling groups. Action for Children a charity that has being running for 145 years, supporting vulnerable and neglected children and young people in the UK had been invited in to discuss the findings from some research they collated in August 2014.

Taken from a Freedom of Information request by Action for Children to all local authorities in the UK between April 2013 and March 2014. The request, completed on Friday 15 August 2014, discovered that 11082 children from sibling groups were placed in local authority foster care and 3598 children had been separated from their siblings. (That's 36%) The response rate was 89%.


We first came across Action for children at one of our first adoption training sessions when a lovely lady who worked for them came in to discuss the importance of keeping up some form of contact with birth parents, the second time was when we met child 4's birth parents, the same lady joined them to support them through the meeting, helping them to ask and answer questions we had and to encourage them to accept that we were going to be child 4's parents.

Whilst I listened to the discussion, I was surprised, yet not, that so many children were split from their siblings, after all it is so very hard to find foster carers that can take on more than one child. It seems that children whom are removed by social services are expected to "just get on with it" yes there is counselling available via CAMHS, child and adolescent mental health services, within adoption there is the post adoption team  and for foster carers there is social services. All of this support though is over stretched,  understaffed and financially constantly short of money.  Children in foster care aren't in an environment where they are unconditionally loved as they would be by a loving family. They have their needs taken care of and they are no doubt loved, but I suspect that as a foster carer you have to hold back the emotional ties because the children you take care of are returned or moved on and to truly fall in love with your charge would lead to devastation when they left. Sometimes I think that we forget the grief those children must feel and that grief surely must be similar to that of children who lose a parent in an accident or through disease.

Not only do we remove children from their parents because they are not being cared for but then we split them up from their siblings, those children grieve for the loss of their parents and the loss of their brothers and sisters. They don't understand that it's for their own good or that they cannot be found a home with their brothers and sister because those homes just don't exist.

The system as it is seems to let down the children it is trying to save, but I don't have an alternative idea do you?

Borneo

Child 1 came home a couple of weeks before the summer holidays to announce that she was going off to Borneo and that she was going to raise the £3400 needed to go.

So we parents dutifully attended the meeting at school ran by an outside agency that run expeditions to amazing places all over the world. They along with the children plan the trip of a lifetime, a three week trip to a far off, completely alien environment where the children get themselves involved in conservation or community projects, where they have the opportunity to explore the natural habitat and where they have the chance to lead their teams.

If I was 15/16 I would jump at the chance to travel to Borneo, our girl is hoping to work in an orang-u-tan sanctuary, to traverse the rainforest of Sarawak and climb Mount Kinabola but to do so she is ironing, cleaning and babysitting and her little group of friends are bag packing in the supermarkets and organising community events, so far they have held a cream tea, a cake stall and have a Halloween Fayre, more cake stalls and a black tie dinner event planned.

So far she is on track to hit her first payment and she is really, really working hard fundraising. But, it's not just been about the money, she has also found the community aspect fulfilling. The cream tea event was amazing, the world war 2 theme encouraged the older population of our parish to all come along and a great time was had by all, in fact we are thinking of an old fashioned 1950s style luncheon event for early next year, and not just to raise money the opportunity to encourage the multitude of generations to come together and to spend time together is probably more important than the fund raising and I am really pleased to say that our teenage girl got that.

I know that she will raise all the money she needs for this, hopefully first of a lifetime trip but along the way she is learning the value of people, money and time. She is showing a work ethic that is full of positivity and just as importantly she is spending time with people from different generations, different walks of life and different cultures and she is loving every minute of it.


 One very proud mum.

A tough week.

To be expected I guess, but our return from holiday has opened a can of tantrumy worms for our youngest child. He has remembered how to throw, he has started biting, particularly child 2 and 3's bums - it's not funny he has left teeth marks! He has learnt to open all the stair gates except one, not that that has stopped him, he just wheels his buggy over and uses it as a ladder to climb over the gate.
He also refuses to go to bed and as he is now in a bed he can just climb out and make an escape.

What to do, we cannot shut him away in his room, shouting has no effect except to make things worse. He almost seems to enjoy the reaction he gets when he hurts someone.

I know from all the reading that I have done that this is all "normal" behaviour for many children in care but it doesn't mean that it is acceptable. I also know that much of what he is doing is "normal" toddler behaviour but it is just so excessive, everything is bigger, louder and harder.

We have to be able to adapt how we deal with him almost continuously. Constant supervision,well as  constant as possible, (I still have to feed everyone, do the washing and keep the bathrooms and kitchen clean enough to stop us from becoming ill) helps tremendously as I can pre-empt much of the physical stuff. Keeping him busy, involved and actively engaged is probably the best thing, although by the end of the day this can be exhausting and although I am desperate for adult company, motivating myself to find some is way down on my list of priorities plus the fact that he currently fights his bedtime routine means that it is too late to do anything by the time he has exhausted himself and fallen asleep.

It's back to school next week, which means a natural rhythm of routine builds and this will probably help. I think our child 4 needs routine and strong boundaries, of course routines have gone out of the window during the holidays and six weeks is a long time for a 2 year old. And a 44 year old!!

Being away means that at least I have returned home relaxed, calm and no longer exhausted, I hadn't realised how tired I must have been until we returned, I was working on auto pilot which isn't good enough when you have to be constantly pro-active and ready to anticipate what could happen next.

I sit here this morning with my morning cup of tea, off loading a little of my worries and fears and a call from the bathroom. Child 4 has used the potty! A celebration, cheers and claps from everyone. A little laughter and something normal helps to keep the worries away.

No Matter What

Whilst away I read Sally Donovan's No Matter What, her story so far of adoption. It's a story of grief rage, perseverance, love and hope. For me it was really good to be able to read so of what is happening in our family, to normalize some of my feelings. The two children that Sally adopted have been so much more damaged than our child 4, especially her eldest and she has been unable to keep up any letterbox contact with her children's birth parents because of this and the way the mum was writing her letters. Our circumstances are very different, yet in so many ways the same.

I found it odd, there was me stretched out on a sun bed, enjoying the Spanish sun, the children were splashing in the pool, the heavily heated air was punctuated with screams and laughter and I am reading about neglect, attachment disorder and so much sorrow. Although the book finishes on a happy note, the story is no where near complete and checking out Sally's blog shows that adoption is a lifelong promise, just like that of having children, but adopted children come with so many additional needs. I am sure I was a little pensive, thoughtful after reading it, I needed time to take on board the feelings it had triggered. The best bit, I realised was the fact that it validated, corroborated how I felt. When people say to me that child 4's behaviour is just normal toddler behaviour, they are in a way right, after all he is a toddler, however often these behaviours are bigger and angrier, they are exacerbated by his history and the way we deal with them has to always be through love, calm and acceptance. Therapeutic parenting is the way we work, and therapeutic parenting is what we teach all those who have any impact on our families life. Not that we always get it right, of course we get cross, frustrated and upset and that is when I go to bed saying tomorrow is a new day, let's start again.

One of the others read it and she found it fascinating, infuriating and made her ask so many questions, I think everyone who knows us should read it, all educators and all those involved in child care of any form should read it. In fact anyone who is considering adoption or knows someone who is should read it. It will open your eyes and your hearts it will provide you with the empathy to try and support these children and their families.


http://www.sallydonovan.net/2013/07/18/no-matter-what-from-diary-to-published-book/

Lost

Travelling in a foreign country often means getting a little bit lost, or in our case quite a lot lost. Last time we were here it took us an hour to find our way out of Malaga airport and find the right road to the villa. Part of the problem is not being able to speak any Spanish then there is driving a different car on the other side of the road and not understanding how the road system works.

This time we flew out on the Friday night, we booked to stay into the Holiday inn overnight as we couldn't move into our villa until Saturday afternoon. Flying out a night earlier saved us nearly £1000 on our flights (there's a discussion for another day). As a party we flew together but of course had all hired cars from different car hire places, dependant on the type of car required. This meant that we would travel separately to the hotel. The Holiday Inn was chosen because of its proximity to the airport and when you looked on the map it looked very easy to find - 7 minutes from the airport. Yeah right!! After thirty minutes of driving I found the sat nav that was built into the car yippee, although we couldn't find the audio part we had to rely on my navigation of a sat nav system, we don't have one at home. Eventually, we pulled up on what looked like a piece of wasteland where the sat nav said that we had arrived at our destination - we had the Inn signage was not very good. We were not the only group in our party to have such difficulty.

I hate being lost, I find it stressful and scary, it's even worse when you are in foreign lands and you have little idea of the direction you need to travel. My husband doesn't handle it well either, which means that our journeys can be uncomfortable, sometimes filled with raised voices and vibes of anxiety. Not good for the children. One of the friends we are with told me that they never get lost they just take a wrong turn, turnaround and head back to where they came from to find the right road. I tried this when we accidentally took a turn to early on our way back from the Mercadona supermarket shop at the beginning of our holiday and ended up high in the olive trees. The children were concerned that we were lost and child 2 and 3 in particular became nervous and agitated ( we,their parents have to take responsibility for teaching them that.)  so instead of saying that we were lost we stopped and looked out behind us to see the view. It was amazing!  After looking our fill we turned around headed back to the junction and found our way back to the old mill that was to be our home for the next two weeks.

I have taken this to my heart, how we as parents react to difficult situations is what our children learn from. I want my children to strike out on their own, to explore their world and that means that occasionally they will lose their way. I want them to sometimes stop look back and enjoy the view, the moment, to make a memory and I want them to know that they can come back to where they have started from and try again.

Peace and war

Yesterday we had a long morning out, morning and lunch with NO children. One of the other couples we are holidaying with took us out to Alahambra. A beautiful Moorish palace that was taken over by Christianity and was the home to Charles V and his wife Isabella of Portugal. We wandered through the beautiful rooms and gardens, walking barefoot over cool marble, running fingers over the tiles that have been there for over 500 years. We gazed upon the intricate stucco-to arches that separate the rooms and wondered how the water that runs throughout is pumped up to then run back through. As the heat increased we followed the exit signs through the now modernised gardens to the Paradour hotel that was once a convent for lunch. We sat upon the shaded terrace with olives and ice cold water and beer and ate salad, pastille and loin of pork in the company of good friends. Not once did I hear the word mummy, I sat through the whole of my meal not having to pour any drinks but my own, not having to cut a meal up or take someone to the loo. Peace, civility and conversation.

We returned back to the villa, mid afternoon, to be told that the children had been really good company and no trouble at all.

Until this morning. Child 4 had a terrible night, instead of the waking and asking to come into our bed, we had crying and disturbed dreams, when he awoke this morning he was, well just angry. Particularly with me. When his daddy suggested a walk! he clung to me saying he didn't want to go but when his Dad a headed off to climb one of the olive tree laden hills he screamed for him, wailing that his daddy was lost.  He tantrumed angrily about anything and everything, his breakfast, his siblings, the DVD player, he became aggressive almost violent towards me, in fact his dad said he could hear him from the top of the hill he climbed.

His whole body language, facial expressions and mannerisms were full of rage all because we had left him with his siblings and some friends for 8 hours,

Emotional frailty, that has been me today.  Following the morning outburst I have felt on the back foot, this is the first time in public that he has behaved like this, I know exactly why he is angry it's because he doesn't feel safe, he was scared of being left behind. But that doesn't help when he is kicking off and you know that despite the support your friends offer, they quite probably don't get it. And even if they do you are scared they don't and you don't know how to explain or even share how you feel I'm case they offer platitudes such as oh it's normal terrible twos.


"Compared with many families, the future will be different for us. We will potentially always need support from experts in the adoption field, we will never be able to stand back from school, we will always be battling the misconception that children are robust and bounce back and what they can't remember won't affect them. We are always going to have to do that little bit extra." Sally Donovan