When the phone rings and it's Blue Sky asking if you would take another child, you split into two people. The first person is (hopefully) the professional carer, who wants to get the information to make a good judgement on if it's a child you can help. The other person is the human being in you, who is naturally curious, even nosey, about the story behind the possible placement. I always find...

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Propped up in bed typing this, 9.30pm. House quiet. Being a Bank Holiday we visited my mum today (100 mile round trip). Me, my partner and our current youngest fostered child to meet my mum for the first time. Seeing my own mum with a fostered child... Fostering other people's troubled children, you don't get much chance to think about the minute-by-minute detail of your parenting. So a lot of it...

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PRINCE HARRY AND FOSTERED CHILDREN Prince Harry's problem photos is a news story that touches three big fostering things: Nudity, Mobile Phones and the News itself. THE NEWS Nowadays, all parents have to be John Craven (the original children's news man). Up comes the six o'clock news; a child...

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SIBLINGS Ugly word "siblings", for something rather beautiful.  That's not to say it can't turn ugly. I didn't know that Tony and Ridley Scott were brothers. I'm afraid I didn't know anything about Tony, I'd only heard of Ridley. The older brother, the one who was knighted. Tony made...

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6.30am Friday morning August 17th.  It's raining. It's rained about 6 out of every 7 days since the schools broke up. Thank you God, or the Jet stream, or whatever. Thank you sooooooo much. SCHOOL SUMMER HOLIDAYS If you're a foster carer you don't need anyone to remind you that...

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                  SPORT AND LOOKED AFTER CHILDREN We Foster Carers are asked to be many things. Parents, tearoom psychologists, detectives, taxi drivers, teachers, chefs, film censors, fashion experts, lawyers. For most of us, being female, the only...

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                            FOSTERING IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES You never know what you're going to get next.  The phone rings and it's Blue Sky. "Hi, wondering, would you consider taking a child who needs a placement...

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HOW CAN FOSTER CARERS STAY FIT? When you start Fostering you're so focused on the job the danger is you neglect your own health and welfare.  The children consistently have a thing about food, so you stock up on the "comfort" stuff, resolving you'll wean them onto fruit once they're...

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POSITIVE THINKING I had an example of positive thinking by a Social Worker last year that is hard to beat. It was an American (naturally) who came up with the concept; "The Power Of Positive Thinking" by Dr Norman Vincent Peale. Recently it's morphed into Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and other...

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