My Blue Sky Social Worker showed up this morning for a Health and Safety check on our home. You get one of these per year in fostering, they're no big deal. This one was different because when I say 'showed up', I mean that she appeared on a What's App video link and we did the whole thing via video.
Brilliant.
What sort of things get checked?
She needed to make sure our driving licences were in order, that our car is MOT'd and insured and that our boiler has been serviced. This meant lots of holding up documents against my phone's camera lens, but hey it worked.
She checked that our garage is locked (vulnerable children don't need to be able to get into the garage; too many possible risks).
I needed to show that medicines are kept out of reach. This is important but easy - there are lots of lockable cabinets on sale. In our house we keep them in a small and elderly but impenetrable Samsonite suitcase that happens to have a combination lock. It means we can carry all our medicines to wherever they might be needed.
I showed her our fireplace and the fireguard we need for when we have a rare fire in the hearth.
We keep toilet bleach out of reach of our foster children, in fact we keep the whole lot of caustic kitchen and bathroom cleaning solutions out of harms way.
I hope this growing list of do's and don'ts doesn't seem oppressive, it's not. You'll see.
So then we talked about our upstairs windows. See, modern windows usually come complete with locking devices, but some of ours are wooden so we had to put long screws through to ensure them shut - no problem.
Health and Safety in the home is a complex thing and thank goodness for social workers who guide us through it. The key for them is how to keep each specific home safe for each specific child. For example, if you have a responsible 16 year old foster child is unlikely they'll accidentally poke something into an unprotected ground-level plug socket. But if you have a curious 3 year-old you'll need socket protectors, again no problem.
We talked about our pets a lot. Our new dog is 10 months old now and our lovely Social Worker needed to know things such as where she did her poo, how quick it was collected, where she slept and what her personality was. Badly kept dogs have done bad things, I'm glad that fostering is on the alert.
Anyway, about done, we moved on to our annual big joke, namely…
Is the puddle in our back garden a water feature or a pond?
Now, this will soon start to get you either fascinated or extremely bored, but you have to remember that for years it's become a running joke. And Blue Sky has resources when it comes to sense of humour and few things are more important in fostering than a sense of humour.
Why does it matter whether it's a water feature or a pond? Er, I think it's because one needs to be covered with a protective mesh and the other doesn't.
Any idea the difference between a water feature and a pond? The definition exists!
Our thing is a plastic tub about a metre across and shin high. If you went into it in your swim trunks you'd not get wet apart from your lower legs, bum, and below your waist. You'd have to be more than flexible than me to get out of it without help. It's titchy. We keep the water level about that of a washing up bowl. It's a water feature.
But…a while back we put a goldfish in it.
Game changer!
A fish?
It's a pond!
Now, I can see - we all can see - that children must be protected from the possible dangers of water. Children have tragically died in garden ponds and lakes and in fostering you have to be careful. If you have a water barrel or even a bucket you keep topped up to give the flowers a drink, you have to keep them out of harm's way.
We keep a wire mesh over our water feature/pond/bucket/puddle/mini-lake.
And every year we do our Health and Safety check and laugh our socks off about the latest precise definition of it.
Which is one of the many helpful support mechanisms Blue Sky do, because fostering is a massive thing to do, and keeping other people's children safe and healthy is a massive job.
Blue Sky help us do it in a low-key way - and with the right amount of laughter.
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