They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Judging by the number of  XXXL supersizers plodding round my Mall, there's a lot of love out there. If there's one thing that helps me most as a foster carer it's food. Foster children, especially newly-arrived, deserve the food of their...

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Something happened  today that reminded me of a good story. I heard it from a teacher at a school of "challenged" children. A lad who was frequently absent and never brought an explanatory note turned up in class after a week away and without a note. "May I ask why you were away all last week?" "I got VD miss" The teacher took the pupil out into the corridor. "VD?" "Yes miss. I got it from...

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I wonder how much money McDonalds and the other fast food joints make out of Contact?  When my children were young I often noticed early on Sunday mornings, lone men with a toddler in tow. In playgrounds, arriving at the swimming pool, or just mooching around in the newsagents. I remember seeing a football match on TV and a young man who'd brought an infant aged about 2 and was holding him aloft...

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FATHER'S DAY, MOTHER'S DAY...aaaarrrgh. Fostering is hard, no argument. Mother's Day and Father's Day, which were no doubt dreamed up with the best will in the world, back in the good old days, when almost every child had a birth mother and father around, are yet another test of our skills. I seem to remember them as a bit of a test when it was just our own children.  One of my current children...

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I often forget how enormously important food is to foster children. And then something happens and it hits you right between the eyes. Last Bank Holiday we took ours to the seaside, and it was a great day. The weather was on our side, there was a sandy beach, and enough wind to buy kites and fly them. Sandcastles were built, followed by trampolining, then paddling. Then we went round the local interactive...

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Tweeting, they've asked me to give it a go. I already have a Twitter account of my own, set up for me ages ago by someone I knew who said it was going to be the next big thing. It's a bit like the pasta making machine which came as a Christmas present one year, I owned it but didn't really know what to do with it. Until a foster child found it and had enormous fun squirting bits of dough through the...

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Little Fostering Moment

One of our foster children is a permanent placement. Poor child, she can never go home. Has no home to go to, no family. Nobody. She's facing up to being alone in this world, yet she's barely tall enough to be allowed on the flume slide at the swimming pool. Alone and angry. Probably terrified beyond imagination, but she bottles up the fear. Doesn't bottle up the anger, lets it out, mainly at me,...

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