The very first day our daughters came to live with us…

Scared! That’s what I was feeling. The thing that kept me going was imagining how scared the girls might have been feeling?

They were living with their cousin, who was in her 30’s and already had children of her own. She actually wanted to keep the eldest of the girls but not the youngest. When she first told me about the youngest she said things to me…’you will see there is something wrong with her when you meet her’, ‘she looks different’, ‘she is really naughty’. Tell you what, if she was trying to ‘sell’ her to me then she was going the whole wrong way about it. I mentioned after meeting the girls to her that I would want them both to stay together, so my husband and I would want them both to live with us. She wasn’t happy about that. I don’t know why she would think it was ok to split them up?

We had 1 meeting with the girls’ social worker. Shortly after that meeting the girls’ cousin decided she could no longer look after the girls and rather than put them in temporary foster care the social worker gave my husband and I the choice to take the girls.

The call was awful, my alarm hadn’t even gone off to get up for work! It was about 7am. My husband had already left for work. She said to me she needed to find an emergency placement for the girls as their current placement had come to an end. She knew my husband and I were thinking about it and at that point weren’t keen on taking the girls as the step mother and birth mother had taken an interest in them but had to be assessed. So we didn’t know whether the girls coming to us would be permanent or not and I don’t know if I could have handled bonding with them and then having them taken off us. The social worker knew we were thinking about adoption and it was basically put across to me that if I said no and didn’t take the girls even if it was only temporary then it would go against us if we decided to adopt with the council in the future. I was gobsmacked and felt like I had been backed into a corner.  I told her I would get back to her.

I got in touch with my husband at work and talked about it as much as we could within the few minutes we had…I called back the social worker and said yes to having them in our care. She said she would be in touch but the girls would be placed with us that day! I called in an emergency leave day at work and then it was a mad rush to get the spare room sorted to suit 2 young children! We had a double bed in there but that was it. I needed bedding, pillows, curtains, a light shade, I even bought some posters of children’s tv show characters to make the room look less bare. My husband finished work at 4pm, we had an hour together and the girls arrived just after 5pm!

We were waiting nervously for them. We knew the youngest was very sociable but the oldest was very shy. They came with a carrier bag of clothes and some cuddly teddy bears. I was shocked they had so little really as I know their cousin had been given a grant to buy them clothes, but that’s another story. They had not had their tea so I asked them what they wanted. They didn’t eat a great deal. My husband had to make another dash to the supermarket to get bottles, drink cups, nappies, wipes etc. We didn’t really know what we would need. The youngest hardly touched her food as she was still on bottles of milk, at 3 years old, and in nappies.

It was very surreal. We suddenly had 2 children in our care which we knew very little about. The time flew over and it was soon bed time, the girls had been quite chatty and we tried to find out more about them. My husband and I were exhausted! I had to lie with them holding their hands until they went to sleep. It took around 40 minutes, i do think it helped that they were in the same bed together.

My husband and I were soon tucked up in bed too. The oldest woke up in the middle of the night as she wet the bed. I had not bought spare sheets so they ended up in our bed and hubby ended up on the couch. They woke up at 6am which we were sooooo not used to. We were shattered to say the least. My husband had to go to work too.

I think back to that day and how much they have changed. They quickly settled with us and I am just glad we made the right decision that day, as things could have been a whole lot different….

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome…

FAS. I’d never heard of it, didn’t even know it existed to be fair.

So the girl’s birth mother is an alcoholic and you do find out quite a bit through the adoption process….

We had a meeting with the youngest before we had to make a decision, it was hard work that day. She had just turned 3. She was very loving, the first time I met her she wanted me to pick her up and sit on my knee, she was very loud, never shut up really! Her behaviour wasn’t great, it still isn’t but at the beginning it was terrible. I know that can be part of the FAS having behavioural problems. ADHD was also mentioned. The day we had her, we took her out and on that afternoon we ware pooped. She was a handful!

So we found out our girls are 2 of 7 children. the oldest 3 were in their 20’s, 2 of which had moved out and 1 lived with their mother. There was a teenage girl who lived with her dad and boy about 10 who lived with his dad. The children had 4 different fathers. My 2 girls had the same father. We found out that the birth mother had stopped drinking with the oldest of our 2 girls and had a normal pregnancy and birth. However with the youngest she did not stop drinking, she drank throughout pregnancy and also took a drug, its stated in her birth report what the drug was called, but I did google it and it was a drug to usually given to cancer patients to help with any pain! The youngest was born 7 weeks early at home, weighing less tha 5lbs and had to be taken straight to intensive care. She was described in the report as being jittery and unsettled when she was born and until she got over the withdrawal of drugs and alcohol. It broke our hearts when we read it.

So the tantrums at the beginning were the worse thing we had experienced with a small child! I mean we had children within the family and children are never the best behaved but this was unbelievable. She was loud, didn’t listen, didn’t follow any instructions, couldn’t concentrate, had her own specific ways of doing things eg putting on her socks! She didn’t understand ‘no’ she would lash out, scream, shout, and whilst in a tantrum be totally uncontrollable. I thought it would never get better.

The nursery she was at had to put in place a plan on what to do when her tantrums started as you could generally tell when she woke up on a morning how the day would progress, if it was a bad day it would be the whole of the day she would be out of control.

We quickly put into place a routine, rules, guidelines, it helped. She hated change in routine, still does, but takes it on board better now than before. We also used things like ‘time out’ which she hated but it got to the point where a warning of time out would be enough for her to calm down.

I would say it took over a year for things to get ‘easier’. When she started school they also had a plan in place for tantrums, they were really good with her and I do think the structure of the school environment did help a lot.

Now…she is a lovely little girl, she always has been really 🙂 She’s outgoing (but can be too friendly at times) she does not know the concept of danger, she thinks everyone wants to talk to her, I worry that if I take my eyes off her she will wander off with someone as she is so easily led, if her friend said to her ‘cut your hair’ she would, no questions asked. With all that said, she is calmer now, no tantrums, just the odd little mood or twist. She is still very specific about some things, her socks still have to be put on the right way!? She also likes to dress up and has a lot of dress up outfits. She is a little entertainer, very athletic compared to academic. She learned how to swim a lot quicker than her older sister and really loves gymnastics and is really good at it too! The best thing though is she is so funny, she makes us laugh every day. Her laugh is infectious. She is very loving too, she’ll always say she’s missed me and her dad if we’ve been at work or she’s been out somewhere. Everyone who meets her loves her. A little character indeed!!

I don’t know what the future holds for her, I know we will do what we can to help her succeed though in what ever she wants to do. She’s 1 of the 2 little star’s of our lives :-)))

I want a baby….

I know some of you may think ‘how selfish…she has two children already….’  and you’re right. I suppose I am selfish, but adopting 2 children has not made the feeling go away. I want to experience a baby. I still want to be pregnant. I still hope that every twinge or feeling tired is not due to the long hours at work and running around after the girls, but that it’s a baby growing inside me. Its awful. I just feel so sad about it sometimes. Do you know what gets me most though? When my friends are deciding whether to have another. My friend from work is desperate for another, but is indecisive about it, whether she’s too old etc. I wish I just had the choice. I haven’t been on any contraceptive since 2004. But still nothing. I still hope that it will happen on its own, but think I believe deep down it never will. I was thinking about IVF again but I don’t know. Do I really want to go through it all again? I don’t think I do. It was really hard last time and there was just the 2 of us, now there’s 4 I have the girls to think about. Then theres adoption again. How long would it take next time? What sort of process would we have to go through? Would we be able to have an under 1-year-old? I know these are things I should ask the adoption service, I think I’m just scared. I want 3 children and adopting another would mean totally giving up the dream of ever having my own….i need your thoughts!!!

 

September 11th…..

Such a sad day for so many people, all those who lost their lives…

September 11th 2012 was the best day of our lives. I was going about my business as normal, I’d been to work, picked up the girls from school and was making their tea, i hadn’t had chance to check any messages on my house phone, my mobile phone was on silent also. I’d put some pasta on and checked my mobile phone really to just see what time it was and when everything would be ready, i noticed i had a few messages.

I had missed calls from my social worker and machine messages…i played the messages before calling her back. It said ‘congrats mam and dad, the adoption has been granted….give me a call…’ my first thought was that she had the wrong number, surely… and the messages after would be apologies, but they were asking me to call her. I then checked my house phone to where I’d had a message left on there from the court, saying the adoption had been granted, and to call them regarding a date for our celebration day. I couldn’t quite believe what i was hearing!

I called my social worker back, and she explained everything, i was lost for words! She said our application was accepted as soon as the judge saw it. She also said they weren’t even going to give the birth mother opportunity to contest, she knew adoption was on the cards and she never contested with social services or even tried to make amends. So it was done! I of course called the court straight after to confirm everything she had just told me, after all i wanted to confirm it was right.

The girls were upstairs playing, the pasta was bubbling away and i was sat in a daze. My husband was at work un-contactable. He was soon finishing though but needed to talk to someone so i rang my mam, she was like ‘hello’ i said ‘mam its me, the court and social worker have been on phone, and the adoption has been granted’ i burst into tears. At that moment it actually hit me, and i am sat here in tears now thinking about it.

It was probably the most emotional day of my life, even getting married, trying to conceive, having IVF etc was nowhere near as emotional.

I was recently asked in a job interview what my greatest achievement was, i told them adopting my daughters, as i said it i got so overwhelmed and filled up and as i was telling them about it, one of the women interviewing me started crying. But it is my greatest achievement, our greatest achievement as husband and wife. They were finally our daughters and the fight to adopt was finally over.

The adoption process…

Horrible…thats the only word for it!

I can totally understand why people are put off  by the adoption process. I personally had never known a friend or family member that had adopted. I obviously knew of people, like someone i worked with, their brother was adopted, and someones friend had just adopted, but i hadn’t spoken to anyone about the process.

We knew from the beginning we wanted to adopt the girls. It was rocky at first as there was still the birth mother and step mother in the picture. The step mother was soon ruled out due to many reasons, the major one being that her son was one of the people convicted of killing the girls birth father…

Soooo…it was us against the birth mother.

We were told we would have to go through the same adoption process as anyone else, even though the girls were living with us. We had been approved as foster carers in January 2011, and we were told that we could start the ball rolling with adoption once the girls had lived with us for 1 year. Fab, or was it?

The social workers knew we wanted to adopt the girls and to start the process asap. In the August of 2011 we asked about the next step we would have to take to adopt. This is when we kept being faced with brick walls. They constantly changed the goal posts, I know it wasn’t the simplest of situations but we were fostering the girls, we wanted to adopt them, they had been living with us a year, what was the problem?

After months of going backwards and forwards we were now at the beginning of 2012! We were told that we would have to go on an adoption training course. We did, the best thing about it was the other couples we met. But we were the odd ones out, even other people were wondering what we were doing there, we already had the girls living with us. That was in April 2012. We even got accused at the training by another couple of doing ‘back door adoption’. I overheard her talking about us and i confronted her. She said we were doing it the ‘easy way’. Wow, nothing we had been through so far had been easy. To be approved as foster carers the assessments made are almost identical to the ones completed for potential adopters.

We complained, which was another long process. Social services kept bringing up reasons not to adopt and why long-term fostering would be a better option!!!??? A better option for who? Them? Certainly not us or the girls. They told us…the birth family lived too close (in the next town), the birth mother wouldn’t sign the girls over (we ended up doing a statement of facts so we didn’t need her permission), the girls had older siblings who didn’t approve and one had had threatening behaviour (don’t know why this would be a reason against adoption)…there were more, the manager of the social workers we were dealing with even said we could be approved as a higher band of foster carer which would have an attractive weekly payment! My husband and I were left in disbelief after she left our house that day!!

In August 2012 we went against what social services said and put in our adoption application along with our statement of facts. We then played a waiting game…

15000 kids and counting …

Did anyone see that tv show last night? Wow it made me mad. Really mad. Just need to have a bit of a rant.
If you didn’t see it, it was about the 15000 children waiting to be adopted. The first show concentrated on some families who were in the process of having their children taken off them.
One of the couples was a young girl and her partner was abusive and that was the reason for removing their daughter but she wouldn’t even consider leaving him. So in the end their daughter went into foster care and was going to be adopted. The guy had the nerve to say ‘I know there are people out there that can’t have kids but why should they have mine?’ The young girl also said ‘I hope my daughter has a better life than I did’.
It really grinds on me. How can people think that their children are taken off them just to be given to people who don’t have children? Not for any other reason???
Of course the children will have a better life with adopters. They’re going to a family who want them more than anything, who are going to give them everything they need and love them forever. I’m not saying their birth parents don’t love their children but when you see how they have their priorities their children aren’t top of the list!
It really does my head in watching programmes like that but I can’t help myself.

1st time being called Mam & Dad…

It was April 2011 and our oldest asked whether she could call us mam and dad. My face would have been a picture. It was the best thing i had heard in a long time. We had to ok it with the social workers as everything was still up in the air about whether the girls would be with us permanently but they wanted a mam and dad, and thats what we became to be known as.

In May 2011 we went on our first family holiday together. We had had a couple of short breaks away but this was 2 weeks in Florida. The trip had already been arranged before we got the girls as my husbands dad was paying for us all to go along with my sister-in-law, her husband and 2 children. When we were there it was strange. My mother and father in law were ‘all for’ their other 2 grandkids and the only way i can describe the way we felt is…left out. Big style.

When you feel left out, for whatever reason, you think of reasons why. The only reason i could think of is that they loved their real grandkids more than our girls. It’s awful to say but at that time, that is how i felt towards them. They still go on at how great that holiday was, i don’t think it was a great holiday, and i have never said it was.

I know it takes time to get to know people, get used to people. I am very protective of my girls. Theres a women i work with who collects food for the salvation army, and last christmas she did a toy appeal too for unprivileged children, she always does a lot for charity. She came back from her lunch break with some teddy bears one day and my boss had said to her ‘aww you should adopt one of them children, that would make their christmas more’ she replied with: ‘no way, i would never have a ‘stranger’ in my house!’. She knew i was sat next to her and i was shocked she actually said something like that without thinking. I wanted to slap her, instead i said ‘my girls were strangers to me, and i quickly fell in love with them’. She did not know what to say or where to look!

People can be cruel and it does worry me sometimes about the future and what things might be said to my girls. Or more scary what they might say to us as their parents.

At first it wasn’t easy…

I remember one day, the youngest behaviour had been very testing, she had tantrums like i had never seen before. She used to kick off. That’s the only way i can describe it. This one day i was stressed to bits, i called the social worker to ask for help as no one i knew had ever had to deal with a child like this and my husband and I felt as though at times we couldn’t cope. On that call our social worker asked if we had changed our minds about caring for her. I couldn’t quite believe she had asked me that! I had to then explain again, that the reason for my call wasn’t to get the social worker to come and get the children! We needed help with the youngest! That same day my nana called me for a catch up. She asked how things were going and i told her what had gone on, my nana said ‘give her back, give her back!’ I couldn’t quite believe that either, i said ‘send her back where?’ I don’t know what she wanted me to say? I came off the phone in tears.

Things improved a bit when we had a meeting the week after with someone from the national portage association. It was fantastic. She spoke to our youngest, played with her, advised us on how to speak to her, what rules to set, how to deal with tantrums. We took what she said on board and things changed. Loads. Our little one still had problems don’t get me wrong it didn’t solve everything but it was the help we needed.

We found a lot out about our youngest within the first few months of having her. We had to get her eating solids, at 3 years old! Had to potty train her, her speech wasn’t at its best, she didn’t know a lot of things, colours, numbers, letters etc. We also found out that she had missed every hospital appointment since she was a few months old. Her dad had not bothered to take her. We made appointments and it was confirmed that she did have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

We did not know a lot about FAS only what i had looked into before taking the youngest out for the day. Her facial features are very much that of a child with FAS. It effects her behaviour, a lot! Her social skills are not great either, she is very friendly with anyone, she would take to a stranger sat next to her and start asking them questions. Theres lots of other things associated, but she has a mild case of it as i know it can cause learning difficulties also but it doesn’t seem to have effected her in this way.

 

Fast Forward to 2010…

My IVF ended in 2008 after we decided not to continue with anymore treatments. To be honest i thought once we stopped ‘thinking’ about it, that it would just happen. We did stop thinking about it for while as we had other things to think about….

In 2010 we got a phone call that changed our lives forever. It was early July, a weeknight, my Mam called to say her cousin had been killed. I had never met him, we talked about how it happened, and what a shame and how old he was, he was in his 40’s. She said he had 2 daughters he would be leaving behind, i did think about them, thinking ‘poor things’ but assumed they were older children….

The next week i was talking to my parents again about my Mam’s cousin and it was mentioned that the children he had were both 3 years old, one was almost 4 and once had just turned 3. I couldn’t believe how young they were and immediately said ‘we’ll take them in’. Obviously there was more to it than that, they had a birth mother, but had not seen her since being under a year old. They had a step mother also who due to complicated matters couldn’t care for them, they were staying at their dad’s nieces house but she had children of her own and couldn’t cope.

My husband and I spoke about it and my Mam had already spoken to the girls Great Grandma who had mentioned us as potential long term carers for the girls (she knew we had no children of our own). So from that i got in touch with social services. We had a home visit and we arranged to take the youngest out for the day as she had fetal alcohol syndrome and they wanted us to be sure this is something we could do and wanted to do. That day was the most stressful day of my life, but in no way did it put us off. We wanted the girls.

So the ball was rolling with social services and the girls cousin was keen to get the girls out of her house. Things had to move quickly. We had a further meeting with social services, it was then mentioned that we could potentially be long term carers for the girls, but the birth mother and step mother had taken an interest in caring for the girls. So if we took them in it may not be permanent and we would be classed as family foster carers with no financial help.

This changed everything.This had been mentioned to us on the Thursday – 5th August 2010. Social services contacted us the day after and said she needed our decision asap , otherwise she would have to look for a foster home for the girls if we didn’t take them in and they could be split up. We made a decision that morning. The girls arrived at our house with a bag of teddy bears and a bag of clothes between them at 5.30pm that same day.

It was a quick turn around to make their teas, give them baths, put them to bed. My hubby had to make a quick trip to supermarket. We needed things we hadn’t anticipated. The Youngest, who had tuned 3 a couple of weeks before was still having milk! 9 bottles a day in fact, and still in nappies!

It wasn’t the best of nights, they didn’t come with pj’s, and the oldest one wet the bed, we had to change her in what clothes we had. The next day we hit the shops. They needed everything. When you know something is happening you can plan, a baby for instance, you have so many months after you find out to buy things and prepare. We had a few hours.

I took 2 weeks off work, my husband and I both worked full-time, and as it was foster care and not adoption we were not entitled to any time off other than annual leave. It was hard, I’m not going to lie, they needed constant attention and they were fragile too. The oldest was very quiet and withdrawn and always wanted to act like a baby. The youngest had behavioral problems and had very testing behavior! She was really hard work. She had also seen her father be killed, which at that time she could remember what had happened and some things effected her more than others.

So within a month of being told about these 2 girls, they were living in our house. We had gone from 2 to 4 basically overnight!