A FOSTERING PROBLEM

I have a problem, it comes with fostering. It's not the biggest problem ever, but it's there. It's this; almost every time I use my mobile phone to make a call I scroll down to the name I want. This usually means my eye has to go past the name of a child who was with us about a year ago. The child owned a mobile phone, so I added the number to my phone, obviously, while the child was with us. The...

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IS THIS THE ANSWER TO BEDTIME BLUES?

One of our children once said to me "Why do you make us go to bed when we're wide awake then make us get up when all we want to do is sleep?" My answer, something along the lines of  "You have to be right for school" was true, but rubbish, really. The big truth is we probably used to go to sleep when it got dark and got up when the sun rose, for millions of years. Then along comes electric...

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RESPITE

When the Royal family go on holiday my other half usually shouts at the telly: "Holiday? From what?" He didn't used to like going on holiday; he wasn't one for getting a tan or picking at croissants for breakfast. He was only happy when there was sport on at the beach bar. One year we beat Australia at cricket, the matches lasted five days, started straight after breakfast and went on until early...

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FOSTERING AND MOTHER'S DAY

We've never been much bothered about Mother's Day in our house. My mother never bothered. If we asked what to do on Mother's Day, she tended to say "Don't bother about it". Her view was that she knew how much we loved and liked her, and she didn't need time and money wasted on schmalzy offerings. Nor did she go much on breakfast in bed, although me and my brother did enjoy being downstairs unsupervised...

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AAAAAAARGH

A well-meaning social worker once said to me "You can't call it a paddy these days; racist overtones."  I'd been describing how a looked after child had lost their cool.  The child had been diagnosed with ODD. Stands for "Oppositional Defiance Disorder". Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but I reckon the experts who came up with "ODD" sailed a bit close to the wind with what they thought was a...

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CONTACT - IS THE END IN SIGHT?

I don't really like talking about things in the news on this blog, I think these pages are more about the day-to-day human aspects of fostering. But they've just announced that Parliament is bringing in a law to make it a criminal offence to emotionally abuse a child, and this might end up affecting everybody in fostering, on a day-to-day basis, and on a very human aspect of fostering. At the...

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