Why I write

We have two little people (Little, aged 6 and Tiny, aged 3), who were placed for adoption with us in the latter part of 2016. Like every other prospective adopters, we'd read a lot about theories, difficulties and various approaches beforehand, but without any specific children to link it to, I quickly reached information saturation. Then the little people arrived, and as we'd been warned, nothing quite prepares you for the reality! Probably the truest piece of advice I was given prior to their arrival was from a (birth) parent colleague of mine, who said 'nothing can prepare you. You can't realise how much your life will change until it does!' She was so right.


In my professional life, I work in the health and social care sector, where pretty much everything we do is based on tried and tested evidence based approaches. In my work I'm frequently required to reflect on why I'm doing things a certain way, and I've found that one of the ways to keep myself sane is to apply the same approach to my parenting. Now that I recognise little bits of my children in almost everything I read, the theories have gained a new energy for me. I accept that a lot of parenting is instinct, but I still like to have something solid to back my instinct up; to hear from others, who are experiencing similar difficulties, what has worked for them; and to try to apply some of the approaches, which, while great in theory, usually demand a great deal of emotional energy, which is sometimes in short supply in our house!


When we were going through the approval process, I read a lot of blogs (sometimes compulsively) by several different adopters. I've found, however, that a lot of people tend to write more about the approval process and very early days, and that things just drop off once daily life sets in. An inevitable part of parenting (often high needs) children, perhaps, but it also leaves me with a lot of curiosity for how things are going for these families. So this is my attempt to make sense of our new life, and organise the chaos in my head, and if it can be of some use to other families in the process, then even better.

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