GOOD CAN COME FROM TERRIBLE

I don't want to harp on about the coronavirus and the lockdown etc.

So I won't.

I do want to tell you about some of the nice nooks and crannies of parenting that the whole thing has magnified.

Middle foster child is nearly ten, going on twenty-seven.

Child used to regard the difficulty of going to sleep as a big problem. Being awake half the night left the child exhausted by midday and lonely and frightened the following 2.00am. The child had to try to sleep see, because it was school in the morning and it gets pointed out to them they mustn't yawn in class.

Anyway, sleep is no problem any more. Everything is on the button.

Rises as and when, usually about 10.30-11.30am. I've talked with friends with similar-aged children, it's normal, if not exactly copy book.

Eats a brunch instead of breakfast just like swanky top end people do at weekends, then rattles through the schoolwork set for him (which is working really well for him, I k now it's difficult in a lot of homes).

Then goes back to bed.

Sleeps.

Gets going proper about 4.00pm, gearing up for friends time. This is how it is for our foster children right now, if not children of all types everywhere; their network is virtual.

How fantastic is that!

When I was a kid my potential friends were limited to neighbourhood kids and kids in our school class. About 5 to 10 possibles…

Middle foster child has access to just about every potential friend…in the world! And it's being used!!

People my age often go "Tut tut!" about the internet, they've probably enjoyed their diet of it's dangers. I'm doing a Blue Sky training session on internet safety shortly, yes it can be a danger but wow it can be an absolute boon.

So child gets going on the PC about 6.30pm, because that's when child's gang are showing up. They're mostly Americans. Child has a buddy in Nebraska, someone in San Jose, another in Canada and a German dude who stays up into the night like our kid.

Our kid gets every new internet friend up on visuals to be sure it's not a 47-year-old with a dodgy agenda.

Then…they play! Not just... 'play' because 'play' is far more than a meaningless pleasure.They explore stuff like friendships and empathy and loyalty and conflicts and - maybe best of all - how to win by bonding and sticking together.

They learn their place among others.

They begin to find out who they are and who they want to be, and close the gap between.

They aren't just hanging around on a patch of playground tarmac talking about whether their Physics teacher is loopy. They're on some virtual planet pitched in as a unit to go head to head against a bunch of armed dinosaurs or whatever. It's active, it's interactive…most of all it's fun. Jeez, shouldn't we all be looking for ways to have fun right now?

This pandemic is truly awful, it's taken so many lives and will take more. Perhaps we will have to live with the threat for a very long time.

But it's not disrespectful to those who are suffering to hope that, human nature being the heroic thing it is, some good comes from it.

Read More

FOSTERING; STOCKHOM SYNDROME?

Being locked-down with somebody else's children - that's fostering in the age of the coronavirus - is hard work, but interesting.

There's been a strengthening of the bond between ourselves and our looked-after children, though they don't rush at us to tell us that they like us even more than before. But they do...they do seem to like us even more. And I'm not sure why.

Our middle foster child came chuntering into the living room while we were watching a 5.00pm TV coronavirus update;

Middle child; "What's all this, oh b*****y h**l!! They still going on about the d****h bag virus. Duh! Yak yak! Virus duh and virus… er duh! It's a germ dude! Get over it. J***s C****t!"

And he left. I thought he made a number of decent points, albeit within the parameters of his own vernacular. What had he told us?

He's scared for himself. The news has felt the need to report the deaths of young people and children, presumably to help everyone understand that everyone is at risk, but it must be sickeningly frightening for many kinds. Also; he hasn't had much good happen in his life so far and he'd feel totally cheated if he had to leave for Heaven without having had much in the way of Ambrosia.

He is scared for his mum and dad. His mum in particular, he doesn't know much about his dad. But he knows his mum doesn't know how to look after him and she sure doesn't know how to look after herself.

But how come the new wave of empathy from our foster kids?

Is it the Stockholm syndrome? That's where captive hostages form a bond with their captors. If I'm not mistaken one kidnap victim joined the group of terrorists who had kidnapped her and helped carry out a bank raid. Surely not, after all, foster children are hardly in captive are they? Although the facts of the matter might not get in the way of how some of them might perceive their circumstance.

Perhaps it's just that they can see that the virus is serious, that anyone can get it and it can be life-threatening for anyone. We have a fostering agency keeping us on track with how to protect our foster children, and we stick to it to the letter. Some of the requirements are a pain for them - our eldest was very miffed that we wouldn't let his bestie come round to shoot the breeze last weekend. His argument was that his bestie has a mum and dad who live apart and he's been able to visit both of them, so er…he's obviously not got the virus. We stuck to a simple and obvious 'No' and threw in that we thought the bestie's mum and dad were taking a chance, we weren't sure what the law might say, not that we were going to raise it with anyone - after all it was his hearsay and almost certainly skewed to shore up a flimsy argument.

Then there's the constant hand washing and anti-bac wipe-downs. Middle foster child was indignant that a bag of hot chicken wings ridge crisps that had been specifically requested had got antiseptic 'all over it' which would 'ruin the taste'.

They roll their eyes as if it's a pain when I insist they keep track of their parents wellbeing, and that we all wish them well.

There are lots of plusses, no really there are. Of course the illness is awful and has caused terrible grief and fear, and it's not done yet (it's mid-April 2020 at the time of writing). But just as previous generations told us that there was something special in the ether during wartime, there are good things going on all around.

I think that our foster children are more in tune with us foster parents at this time because they feel a bit safer with us than they might have done in their real homes. They would know what their real parents are like, and whatever their faults, the children will be desperate to know that their folks are being sensible, taking advice about staying home, and observing the precautions.

They might even be happy that we show we care about their parents, that we make sure we keep them informed about their parents…but are dealing with the fact that they might feel personally safer in our house than in their real home.

Read More

FOSTERING FUN

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.

Read More

LOCKDOWN = CRISIS FOR FOSTERING?

There's enough to worry about what with everything at the moment (the virus lockdown etc). I don't want to add another concern.

But I haven't heard this one mentioned yet, so I'm going to.

When I started fostering one of the most surprising things was when I learned that more children come into care between December 25th and January 2nd than any other time of the year.

It surprised me because I'd assumed it was the season of goodwill in every home, a time of the family coming together…but no.

It turns out that when some families are cooped up together with nothing to do but eat and drink it can bring out the worst in them; jealousies, old rivalries, simmering resentments - the list is endless, and the breakdown happens over a period of 12 days.

So - and here's my point - what's going to happen in suchlike families when they have even less scope to get out and are cooped up for 12 WEEKS.

OR EVEN LONGER!!!

We're less than a week into lockdown here in the UK and the media are bombarding us with serious stuff about how to look out for the elderly and vulnerable - quite right too. There are lighthearted features on what to do to pass the time. But what about the physically fit and healthy but daggers-drawn families  more used to a lock-in or a lock-up than a lockdown?

One thing's for sure; there's not a lot anyone can do to prevent such families from boiling over. Their problems are usually deep-rooted and intractable. So; if it it's going to happen it's going to happen.

About the only thing we foster carers can do is hope and pray that more people come into fostering.

And that the government, which seems to have discovered a forest of money trees, can help with the cost.

Everything else, let's hope, will get back to normal eventually. The stock market will 'bounce back' (don't it always?). Premier League football will be on 7 days a week again, queues will concertina up again, toilet rolls will be available again.

The child who has to stay with a dangerously chaotic family because the only place they can be housed is the local police station cells, may never be the same again.

Read More

SOMEONE LIVING IN OUR FRONT GARDEN

Fostering, like life, is full of surprises. No-one saw the Covid-19 coming.

If you're reading this a considerable time after it was posted you'll know how the virus thing turned out.  

I suppose if you're reading this a considerable after it was posted that means that we got through it. It seems certain that we didn't get through it without the tragedy and tears of loss. Back in March 19th 2020 - today - we could only hope the loss of life will be minimal.

At the moment of writing this it's 6.30am in the morning and everyone else is asleep. It's a Thursday which would normally mean the house would be shifting about with hangdog people giving off theatrical lethargy and a controlled edginess pointed at the person cajoling them to get off on time.

Not this morning. Today is the day following the UK government's announcment that schools are to be closed from tomorrow until further notice. The announcement was made about 5.00pm yesterday afternoon after my brood had spent a tense time awaiting the news with hope in their hearts.

Eldest foster child was indignant;

"If Scotland and Wales can close their schools why can't we?"

To my surprise he listened to my attempt to answer that.

When the announcement was made the house experienced a new mood. A mood that can only be brought on by such news as this; no school for the foreseeable future!

I'm happy too. I love it when the house is full of life. But it's  not unmitigated joy, there are people in pain and fear, plus the person I love is living in our front garden.

What has happened is this;

My other half, who I've been with through thick and thin for three decades, has an old respiratory condition. When he was a child he was given a vaccine against polio but it backfired and he got polio. They thought he might never walk again, but he beat it and although he'll never run any marathons you wouldn't know his past from the spring in his step.

Polio, it turns out, often never fully leaves the victim. It's ghost can return in what they call post-polio syndrome. One of the symptoms can be respiratory problems. Which, should he contract Covid-19, could make him vulnerable.

In the middle of the night before last he felt hot, then went feverish. He had a headache, sore throat and achy limbs. His work takes him to a number of different workplaces, and one of them has an employee who tested positive about ten days ago.

We didn't panic, but he had to isolate.

We are VERY lucky in that we've got a little motor home, in fact we were due to go away for a couple of nights soon. But instead of being a holiday home on wheels, our motorhome has become an isolation unit on wheels.

He moved in straight away, about 6.30am yesterday. His temperature was 37.8C, a tad below the virus warning number.

I cleaned and sprayed everything he might have touched in the house and kept up a manic regime; every time I walked past the kitchen sink I washed my hands.

I texted the kids in their bedrooms and got a really nice reply from eldest foster child, a young man not famous for his kindness and consideration, but it's in there. He replied;

"I hope he's okay."

Doesn't sound much but it was. In fostering, no matter how crazy life gets, you are always looking for for fostering's many good moments.

Next thing I called Blue Sky (their offices open at 9.00am though you can get them any time of day or night if you need to). Their first words were the same as my foster son's. They said they'd inform my Blue Sky social worker who I'd met with three days before. She was going on leave that very morning however her holiday of a lifetime to Thailand was called off at the last minute.

Everyone's lives are all over the place.

I didn't get much rest with him in the van, me passing him things he needed (paracetamol, a fresh battery for the thermometer) through the drivers side window, then coming inside and…washing my hands. His temperature crept down, his headache softened. All day I was geared up and ready to call our surgery to see if they had any test kits, but he never reached a point of distress.

This morning I opened the bedroom curtains and looked down. He saw me from the motorhome and waved. We texted. He was on his first cuppa. His temperature was 37.3C, still a bit high for him. Headache a bit better, still pounding. Most of all; no dry cough - or at least no more of a dry cough than he's had a long time now.

I made him a sausage sandwich and passed it in through the window without touching his hand.

Got to go, the downstairs is filled with children claiming there's no point going to school today as half the staff are off and tomorrow - the last day - will be a short day anyway. 

Take care.

Read More

CORONAVIRUS AND FOSTERING

Blue Sky have been keeping us Foster Carers informed of what the Coronavirus means to us; all the good old-fashioned common sense stuff, but I thought I'd pass on a titbit of my own that came home from school via eldest foster child.

The child in question has a love hate relationship with school; he hated it for a long, long time. He hated it until we got to the bottom of why he hated it. When we did we fixed it and it's stayed fixed. What happened was that we finally worked out that when we sent him to school he felt deep down that we were trying to get rid of him. I guess it must seem like that to a lot of children whether they are aware of it or not.

Anyhow, using the truth and hammering home the fact that we LOVED having him in the house, that we HATED it when he went off to school, that we LONGED for half past four when he's thumping through the front door like a bear with a sore head. We repeated over and over that our home is a HAPPIER home when he's in it, and SAD and BORING for everyone when he's out at school. And he went and did just what anyone would dream of doing but most of us chicken out. Not him. He called our bluff, in case it was a bluff.

He stayed home. Morning after morning he'd come down in his uniform and we'd go;

"No! Don't go to school! Please stay home…!' Etc etc.

So he did!

For nearly three weeks!

Boy did we have some explaining to do to attendance officers and their suchlike, but they got it and…it worked. One morning he came down and said;

'I've had enough of you lot all day, you're smothering me!'

And off he strode, and now has an 80% attendance record and climbing, and more important, is a much happier bunny.

That said, he's mad keen on the idea of schools closing for the virus. Just like the rest of them, except those that have to sit public exams and have geared themselves up for the angst and endeavour and don't know (at the time of writing) what is going to happen.

Today, for example, in our house, eldest foster child is going into school at 11.00am. He has permission to do half-days as one of his problems with school is large numbers of people such as you get at assembly, and fear of appearing different which he feels he would do if he were excused assembly. Plus, he has a history exam and he wants to do it! Result!

So, what's my titbit? He tells us that students (his school is a regular secondary but they prefer 'students' to 'pupils') are requested not bring in alcohol-based ant-bac gels and sprays. Guess why.

No, go on, see if you can guess.

Alcohol based…

Yep.

They've been necking it behind the bike sheds (stupid - tell everyone it's stupid) …and they make you feel sick (surprise).

Just when you thought you'd heard it all...

Read More

HOW DID YOU GET INTO FOISTERING?

When a new foster child arrives you generally get a visit from the nurse. Children coming into care are often less than 100% physically, never mind about emotionally.

Weight is often a problem. None of us needs a nurse to tell us if a child is overweight or worse, but when the nurse, all uniformed up and carrying medical stuff tells a child to eat their broccoli it saves us carers a job, at least for a while. 

One or two are underweight, that can be a sign of a different type of neglect, and the child needs good food and plenty of it.  Nothing wrong in my book with treating such a child to a welcome Big Mac, so long as the rest of the house doesn't get jealous.

Sometimes they have slight co-ordination problems - nothing serious - could be a slight issue with balance or mobility. It usually wears off after a few weeks good eating and…proper exercise. I don't think I've ever had a foster child who had ever been on a nice long Sunday walk.

The nurse who called the other day was one I'd not met before. After examining the child she sat down at the kitchen table next to me and asked a question I usually only get asked by people thinking of fostering;

'So how did you get into fostering?'

When I worked at Debenhams nobody asked; 'So how did you end up behind the cosmetic counter?'

Fostering needs more carers, simple as that. I used to keep my fostering to myself, but now I'm happy to tell people about it's many plusses and its occasional minuses.

When they ask how you got into it it's often a signal they are thinking about it. 

Similarly we had to have some police involvement with a foster child about a year and a half ago. It was down to the child's family, not the child, but two officers paid us a visit. I have always, always found them magnificent when they find out they are dealing with fostering. As they got up to go the younger of the two officers waited back and said to me;

'This is exactly the type of thing I joined the police force to do. You've made me think that further down the line I'd like to foster.'

So how did I get into it? I thought about fostering for a bit then decided to take the bull by the horns, and I telephoned Blue Sky. 

That's how I got into fostering. I stopped thinking about it and did something about it.

And yes, I'm suggesting that if you're thinking about it you do the same.

Read More