A Designer Family?

As we work through our application papers I find myself draw to the section:

16.0	What is the applicant’s view or expectations about the characteristics, ages or number of child/ren that they hope to adopt? 29

Which means we have to state clearly and with reasons, what sort of child or children we would be happy to consider. The categories are as follows:
Background
Child as s/he is
Sexual Abuse
Health Issues
Physical Impairments and Learning Difficulties

I do understand why these things have to be considered - the matches made by social workers need to work in the best interests of the children as as well the parents but I do feel very uncomfortable making the choices. We are not allowed to have designer babies but this process appears to give adopter the chose to design their family from sex to physical characteristics and other inherited traits. Of course there is often no way to tell what issues might become prevalent in the future but we are given the choice to 'reject' (for lack of a better word) children that, had they be born to us naturally we would have learnt to cope with.

For example - had we have had a baby with Downs Syndrome we would have loved that child, given it the very best life possible and learnt how to manage any issues this condition might bring. Now we can decide whether we will accept a child with this condition and whether we are prepared to learn how to cope with it.

It feels very wrong.

Children should come into your life and be love no matter what.

There is a whole tick list of conditions we can say yes or no to and I think that this might be the hardest part of the process. The advice we are given is to read up and discuss these conditions but there are so many of them we are struggling to know where to start. We thought the physical impairment section would be the easiest - our first reaction to children with severely limited mobility was a no as our home is not set up for them but I feel awful saying no despite knowing it is probably for the best all round.

We have some time before we have to fill in this section of the report, time to think, read and discuss as well as try to decide. I just hope we can make the right decision.

Good Luck Signs

So, it is good luck when a pidgeon craps on your hat?

I do hope so because that was my fate on Sunday afternoon.

As we marched down Gloucester high street I was concerned when I felt 'something' hit me on the head. Nothing heavy but definatly a 'something'. Once I was able to take off my hat I could check that the offending something was, in fact, the result of a pidgeon flying overhead doing its business. On my hat. Nice.

My hat will most certainly wash. But I got the following reactions:
'at least is was on your hat and no in your face' very true
'at least is was pidgeon and not seagull' even truer
'isn't that supposed to be lucky?' I have no idea.

I don't normally believe in lucky signs, good or bad, but it might be nice to have some good luck come my way. I will have to wait and see. 

Summer Dreams

This summer I hit the big 3-0 and strangely I am really looking forward to it. I decided that I wanted to really celebrate in a way I have not done since I turned 18. I wanted a party. A proper, no holds barred with music and dancing, party.

In the hope that I could fulfil a few other dreams I decided to go for a 1940s/1950s theme with the music, the dancing and the dresses. I have always dreamed of a really beautiful silk full circle dress, one that I can sping round and round whilst wearing with petticoats and have the dress spin with me. For months I have been looking for it. I found one on a well known but expensive shop website in the UK but decided to be brave with a Chinese made reproduction.

It arrived this week – weeks earlier than I expected it to and you can only imagine my excitement when I realised what my parcel was. The colour was perfect, it fit and the manufacture was exactly as expected (decent quality for what I paid). The sad thing is that, although my underwear has also arrived and I have found the perfect shoes I have not had chance to try the whole outfit together yet - this is job for when there is someone in the house to admire and get excited with me. Sadly excitement on your own just doesn't have the same fun level.

I also think that I am seeing this event with a dual purpose, yes to celebrate and have a wonderful time but I am also hopeful. I am hoping that by then (11 weeks away) I will have news to share with the people I care about.. I am not naive enough to think that we will have seen approval panel by then but my hope is that we will be able to have a date by then. I know that it might not be like that but June will be 6 months since the start of the preperation course and I would like to see the next big milestone in the road towards our goal.

In other news I have a great weekend coming up - Gloucester, re-enactment and friends. Plus a (hopefully) nice B+B. I can't think of a better way to start the summer.   

Disicpline

Discipline was something that came up at at our last appointment in terms of how I was disciplined as a child and how I plan to do this with children of my own. It got me thinking about all the different theories and methods and what the mean, what they entailed and how they need to be carried out. So far I have concluded that consistency is key - what ever we decide needs to be consistent for both of us as well as other 'care givers' and then consistent across all behaviours.

I am a firm believer that boundaries need to be set and need to remain the same as well as the consequences of unacceptable behaviour are clearly set down. I am also a realist and I know that my children will not be perfect.

Many parents use a 'time out' or 'naughty step' for their children and I would have said this would have been a good thing to use but, as rightly pointed out, these children are attached to their parents: they have bonded properly. Our children will not have these bonds formed and for many being sat in a time out can cause problems as the child believes that you will not return. It really scares me that I could do something that for a normal birth child would be the right thing but that for an adopted child might be the end of the world.

The other thing the social worker asked about was smacking. I was smacked as a child. Always as a last resort, never in anger and I never recall being hurt when I was smacked. My memories also tell me that I did deserve the smack as the consequence for my actions. So, how do I feel about smacking? Is it something I want to do with my children? No. The short answer is I never want to be in a position when smacking is an option but is this a perfect world? No it is not and I would not hesitate to smack a child to prevent a more serious injury but I would never want to cause pain.

I guess I can't make any decisions until we know the child, until we are aware of the background, the circumstances and the situations and from there we can choose what will suit us and our children.

Mothering Sunday

Tomorrow is Mothering Sunday.

It should have been my first one as a mummy but sadly that was not to be.

Next year will be the one. I have faith.

For this year I have my Mum with me and I intend to remind her just how special she is.

Rounds 3 + 4 - All alone

The homework we were set for this week was very individual - the preparation for our individual appointments. These are seperate to allow our social worker to concentrate on each of us and the experiences that are personal to us. This week is the first time I have really struggled with the task set - write something to describe Andrew (persoanlity, character traits, good things and things that frustrate or annoyt) and then to write about my childhood - my memories and experiences, my relationships with my family and how these have chnaged over time and working on from this what sort of parent I want to be.

I decided to keep my bit on Andrew to a minimum:
Andrew is a kind man with a calm outlook on life. He has always been a constant source of support even if I didn’t appreciate it at the time. His balanced and reasoned manner is the perfect contrast to my more impulsive nature He has a great sense of fun but I find his indecisiveness frustrating at times.

After that it took me a long time to get my teeth into what I wanted to put forward and even when it was submitted I was not overly happy and luckily I was able to be honest with our social worker that I have struggled. My appointment was yesterday afternoon and it has taken me a while to digest it. I did feel very alone with our Andrew sat next to me but we started well discussing my meories of childhood - the places I lived, the time spent with my parents and sister and how our relationships progressed.

I did, at points, feel like I had to justify the choices my parents had made when I was a child - why did they both work full time was something our social worker really focused on even to the extent that I got a bit defensive in that my parents were good parents - we were always well cared for, well feed, educated, well dressed and above all we were loved and we were given every opporuntity.

When we moved on to the part about what sort of parent I want to be I have to conclude that my answers were 'like my parents'. I know in an ideal world parents would be home all the time for their children but this is not an ideal work and working means I will be able to provide for my children. In my opinion it is making time really count for something and making it special. This did lead to a discussion about discipline which gave me a lot to think about.

Anway Andrew has his appointment in 2 weeks time and then we are back together for the rest of them, a good thing as it is nice to have the support as well as some one who was in the conversation to go back over it.

In other news I have finally taken the plunge and made the first purchase in what I hope to be lots of purchases in readiness for the inclusion of children in our lives - I have bought a safety pack including corner guards, drawer and cupboard catches and the much debating plug socket covers. I have also bought 3 second hand safety gates that can be used around our house. My one shop based purchase was somewhat spoiled by the snotty shop assistant who gave me a few pointed looks (yes, you can look at my middle all you want, I am not pregnant and if your scowl indicates a 'is it too early to purchase these as you aren't showing yet' don't be so close minded or judgemental) but I made the choice to smile and leave the shop with my purchase feeling like I have made another tiny step towards a day I can only dream about.

An E-Petition

I don't usually sign petitions or ask other people to sign them but this was has really struck a cord with me due to my experiences.

This one is asking for the basic right to recognise a baby born before 24 weeks. That is so that the parents are babies born sleeping, before their time can be official recognised and those parents that wish to can have things like services of remembrance. These are things you can't have when you  have no certificates of birth or death.

E-Petition - registering births before 24 weeks

Me, My Scrapbook and I

So, I had a thought to branch out on here as although this blog is place for me to share my adoption journey I also want to share something of who I am. I know that this journey has the capacity to take over my life but I don’t want to ‘loose’ the bit of me that makes me ‘me’ in the process. I did this when were trying to conceive and going though all the infertility treatments and it was no fun plus it took me a long time to feel like myself again.

One of my new past times is scrapbooking. I have always enjoyed making cards – cross stitch cards were the start and then I moved onto paper crafts and decoupage as well other paper elements. After my miscarriage it was mainly as a response to my need to be busy all the time. I desperately wanted to keep my mind off how devastated I was and creating something was something positive I could cling to. From there I have had to move onwards as I have boxes of cards made up and not enough excuses to use them and whilst some I am really proud of others show that I am an amateur at it.

Which led me to a scrapbook. I decided about 8 months ago to do a book for 2011 and I bought myself a spiral bound book from Paperchase and set about printing photos and making a piece of art of it. I was so please with the result that I decided my 2012 book would be a proper 12 x 12 album with page protectors and everything. So far I am really proud of it – I have spent lots of time and effort into making it into something I can enjoy looking at for years to come. I really wanted a record of the good things, the postive memories and the people and places that mean a lot to me.

What has amazed me since I started this element of crafting was the sheer amount of materials, tools and other gadgets it is possible to collect. I have papers (of different shapes, sizes, colours and types), embellishments, stickers, rub ons, peel offs, ribbons, ink stamps, heat embossing powders – the list feels endless and I know I have barely scratched the surface.

My next idea, as I am working on my 2012 book is a book in which I can detail the lives that Andrew and I have had. I want to include baby photos, memories of us as children and then adults before we met but then I want to include how our lives met and moved forwards and I want to leave at least three quarters empty to include our futures. I don’t even plan to record in it with any regularity just on those important events – our children become ours, starting school all those things that parents like to record.

Choices

Based on some of our discussions with our social worker I have been giving a lot of thought to the question:

Why did I choose not to go for IVF? Why did I choose to stop all fertility treatment when I did? I am sure there are lots of other choices that  have been made that we will need to go back to, discuss, breakdown and examine at great length but I do think this was feels like the biggest we have ever had to make.

I guess there is no easy answer to that but at the time it was the right choice for me.

IVF comes in many forms but all are incredibly invasive and by the time our consultant got round to talking about it as an option for us I had dealt with 2 and half years of tests – blood, tests, scans and other more invasive tests and I really couldn’t face any more. Even now the thought of an internal examination fills me dismay.

That being said when we got to these discussions I was already emotionally and mentally battered, what had gone before had left me in a fragile state that could not have coped with the stresses of more treatment. 

On a practical level any treatment would have been at Nottingham which would have meant countless car journeys so an unknown cost in time off work, fuel money and all those other costs that are naturally incurred like parking and that doesn’t even start on the cost of any drugs we would have had to pay for.

Do I believe that happened was ‘for the best’? No. And I find myself being very angry with people that suggest it might have been. Do I feel that everything occurs for a reason? I want to. I want to believe that I am a stronger person today with more empathy for those around. I also want to believe that our family will be stronger in the future for it.  I know that many couples have IVF successfully but there are also huge numbers that are not successful and for me, if the chances of success had been higher I might have considered it as a valid option but the chance of success for a woman of my age is 33.1% (according to the NHS) and based on that I decided that, for me and for us as a couple, it wasn’t the right option.