Category Archives: Introductions

Introductions are the handover period, where you get to meet and learn how to parent your adopted children, gradually taking over the duties of the foster family. In our case, this took two weeks, in other regions it is just 7 days.

What I Wish I’d Known BEFORE I Adopted

Leave a Reply

Dear Prospective Adopter

I remember being where you are now – the heady excitement of what is to come, the giddy nerves of the all-important Panel, the heart-melting magic of Matching. It is one fabulous adventure.

When I took my children home I was over the moon and under prepared. If only I had known then what I know now, those first few weeks would have been easier and more joyful – which is the aim of this blog.

May it help you through the first unsettling months when it’s weird and your life feels unreal and you’re not yourself and keep wondering why won’t they just eat their tea/ sleep/ stop screaming/ love me?

1. GREAT SLEEP IS YOUR TOP TRUMP

The children are important.

But they need a parent who is confident, capable and can access all their brain. And that only happens if you’ve had enough sleep. A half-asleep, over-caffeinated parent with the emotional stability of dynamite is destined to create a day where you end up blubbing “that could’ve gone better” as you scrape pizza off the ceiling and tears off your chin.

Grab sleep greedily and without apology whenever and wherever you can.

Your child is napping? Nap.
Your child is in bed – go to bed early. 7.30pm early if you need to (I did).
Your child is watching TV? Snooze on the sofa.
You keep waking up in the night? Use earplugs if you need to.
You can’t get back to sleep once woken? Put your partner on night-duty.

Get as much sleep as you need to wake happy and raring to go.

Sleep is more important than ironing, hoovering, tidying, watching your favourite TV shows, mowing the lawn, answering emails, cleaning the bath, painting your nails, shaving or going on Facebook to let people know you are still alive.

The best mum or dad you can be is a well slept one.

2. YOU ARE NOT ALONE

God bless Twitter.

I was a bit “meh” about twitter until I discovered the adoption and fostering twitterati (thanks to @First4Adoption). If you are struggling with any aspect of parenting, adoption, Panel, Matching, Introductions, food fussiness, sleep or potty training, there is someone who will help on twitter.

Open an account – with some vague name like “adopter73.” No-one will ever know who you are (and your social worker can relax). Then load twitter onto your phone, follow a few people (I’m @emmalgsutton, check out who I follow and follow the ones whose posts you like) and join in.

Just recently a brand new adopter, on day 2 of her forever family asked if it was normal for her children to “feels like little strangers”.

The Twitterati replied that it was normal for them to feel like strangers and that love takes time. Maybe that helped her sleep at night, maybe it just took a worry away, maybe she could then step back and think “that is totally normal, we are going to be fine”.

If you want to know what to feed a fussy child – ask twitter
If you are having a bad day – tell twitter, we’ll sympathise and send hugs
If you want to know if continued contact with foster carers can work – ask twitter
If you feel like something is out of kilter – tell twitter and we’ll share our experiences

Sound off, ask for support when you are feeling low, share your concerns, your worries, your hopes, your dreams and build a community of people who know what you are going through.

I only wish I had found them four years ago when I started my forever family, they would have made my life so much easier.

With Twitter, you don’t have to do this on your own.

3. LOVE IS NOT LIKE MAKING A CUPPA

Loving your child isn’t as quick as making a cup of tea. Your family appears “ready-made” when the children come home for good, yet love takes longer to blossom.

As giddy as I was about dating my husband (way back then), it took months for us to truly fall in love, and it will take time for you to love your child/ren. There’s no timetable. There’s no rush.

My daughter loved my husband and rejected me for a while. Despite my confident assertion at Panel that we would ‘deal with any one-parent attachment issues as they arose’, it still had me crying in the morning when she shouted at me to get out of her bedroom.

You might love one of your children first. That’s okay. The love will come.
Your partner might fall in love before or after you do. Still okay.
Your children might love one parent before the other. That’s normal too.
With two parents and two children, one day you will all love each other to bits, but it won’t happen on the same day nor overnight.

Let love grow.

4. WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT WHAT YOU GET

During Introductions, the children played contentedly on their own. They were content, happy and only approached their foster carers Ken and Mary when they needed help or food. They pottered around the house and we shadowed their move from one area to another. They read, played in the sandpit, chatted to us, not all that bothered whether or not we joined in. They were independent, confident, outgoing.

Yet children we’d seen in their video and at the foster carers’ house were not the children who moved into our house.

They became dependent, cautious and stuck to us like chewing gum to hair. They whined and Nibbles went ballistic when we said No, spinning around on the floor like a Catherine-Wheel whilst Andy and I stared at each other in awe and shock.

The move changed our children. And we hadn’t expected it. I naively presumed that we could transfer the children from the video to our home. But they needed more reassurance, more attention, more of us than they had ever needed during Introductions and that took some getting used to.

It took months before Nibbles and Bubbles were like the children we saw in their video.

5. ONE THING AT A TIME

It is all to easy to try to create a perfect family from the moment they move in. Don’t.

I tried to be the best possible parent I could be – with homemade cakes, delicious and nutritious meals made from fresh ingredients, lots of playing together with stickers and playdough and trips to the library and park, with little TV, no shortcuts, no giving in, clear boundaries, walking places without using the pram, whilst constantly battling the influx of toys into every crevice of my house (and even once in my bra). All from Day One. I made myself miserable.

Choose happy over everything: laughter over tidiness, bouncing on their bed over fears of them falling off, messy fun over tidy boredom, reading over ironing, cuddles over clean clothes.

So what if you feed them spaghetti hoops for every teatime for a week or a month? In ten year’s time will that have caused any long-term damage?
So what if you let them watch TV for an hour every morning so you can shower without an audience? Yes I know you don’t want to set a precedent (I can’t tell you how many times I worried about that), but is it really setting them up for a life of crime?
So what if they don’t have a bath for a week because you don’t have the right bubble bath?They might pong a bit, but baby wipes work wonders and do you really want to fight that battle just before bedtime?

Don’t let reporters in the Daily Mail stoke your guilt about feeding them fish fingers and drinking wine of an evening. Do what needs to be done and leave the rest until you have got this bit sussed.

Build your family one solid foundation at a time, and start with love and laughter.

Go for happy. And that includes YOU.

YOU MATTER

It’s easy to focus on the children when they turn up in your family. How can you not, when you’ve waited this long to become a mum or a dad? Yet when we forget about ourselves, when we let our own needs slide, then we are doing our family a disservice.

Sleep, food, laughter and love. Those things matter far more than how much you spend on a pram, or how tidy your house is, or if your ironing gets done.

Make your life simple. Make it easy to be happy. Make your kids and yourself smile, as often as you can.

What do you wish you’d known before you adopted? Comment below and they might make it into “what I wish I’d known… part two”

You’re My Mummy

The Day I Met My Children

1 Reply

What if they don’t like me?

We’re sat in the parked car, fidgeting, having arrived ridiculously early for this Important Day. It’s 915 a.m. and we have a vast expanse of forty-five minutes to kill. So. Much. Time. Today we get to meet our children for the first time. And I’m bricking it.

My stomach can’t decide if the sharks or the butterflies are winning. I can’t sit here fidgeting for that long, but what else can we do? Why not go for a drive? I suggest What if we get lost? And my brain decides to catastrophise — what if we drive off the edge of the known universe into a not-on-the-map black hole from which even a GPS signal and Google Maps cannot rescue us?

What if we’re late?

We drive just a few streets away. We sit. And fidget. And check our phones. And post on social media. And wait. Out of sight. We get out of the car and go for one of the most bland, pointless walks ever. Well, not entirely pointless, because there are now ten fewer minutes to burn.

Today we will meet our children

Our children. They don’t feel like our children at all. They aren’t really our children, except they are, but then they’re wards of the adoption agency, so they’re not, but we’ll be looking after them, so they are, and it’s all quite confusing.

I can’t stop thinking about the moment we’ll see them for the first time.

What if all my dreams and hopes come crashing down around me and I think, ‘I can’t do this?’
What if they’re crying and whining and awful?
What if they ignore us?
What if they don’t like us?
What if they run and scream and hide and refuse to come out?
What if they hate us?
Worse still, what if they like him and not me?

I have no idea what to expect

It’s now 10 a.m. (turns out you can kill time — just worry incessantly) and we drive up to the house. Their foster carer Ken opens the door and welcomes us in with a twinkling smile.

‘Take a seat in the lounge. I think they’ve something planned,’ he says.

That sounds promising or ominous or something (the sharks and butterflies cannot agree). My heart is pounding, my mouth is dry. I perch nervously on the edge of the sofa, waiting for I don’t know what; I’m a child waiting outside the headmaster’s door.

The lounge door opens and in tumbles a huge bunch of flowers — a pink riot of colour and petals and leaves that’s moving all of its own accord. Then I spy her. Beneath this colossal display, wobbling in her efforts to hold it, is a tiny girl with cascades of curls. The flowers drown her, yet she bravely carries them straight to me. She shyly hands them over and in her sing-song voice says four incredible words that I will never forget:

‘Flowers for my mummy’

She looks at me, and I break out a smile before my hand flies to my mouth in shock and surprise. A lifetime of tears well up in my eyes, and despite my promise that I would not cry, tears pour silently down my cheeks. It’s far from the first impression I wanted to make.

Happy tears

A tear for all the times that I went to bed despondent.
A tear for all the times that my period came and I lost faith I’d ever be a mummy.
A tear for all the times I wondered why I couldn’t grow a child.
A tear for a child who never made it past the few cells.
And a tear of utter relief that a child has finally said that word to me.

The word I have wanted to hear and thought I might never hear. The word I do not own despite all the preparation.

Mummy

The most amazing word in the whole dictionary. I thought it would take weeks or months for them to utter it, and it was the fourth word she said. Even better, she used ‘my’ before it, binding me to her in a relationship. I feel complete in a whole new way. I stutter a broken ‘thank you’, but she’s already gone.

She and her brother follow Ken back to the kitchen, where he’s making tea.

Andy sits on the floor, and when they return, these two tiny children are crawling all over him, hugging him and talking to him, tugging at his shirt, smearing dirty fingerprints over his glasses, asking questions but not waiting for the answers, bringing him books to read and toys to play with. I sit back, dabbing my tears and drinking everything in. They take to Andy like pandas to bamboo, and I feel that his idea of sitting on the floor was far better than my bursting into tears.

I dry my face and take a deep breath: we have fifty-seven minutes left to start getting to know these miniature people who are our little boy and little girl.

Our children.

I still can’t believe it

This is an extract from the book “and then there were four” available via Amazon in ebook (Kindle) and paperback versions. It’s an unputdownable, unforgettable rollercoaster through infertility, adoption and parenting.

What happened the day you met you children? Share your experiences below.