Month 4
Jeremy had his one-to-one with Adoption Worker Chris and won the prize for the most complicated background that Chris had ever seen!
Jeremy’s parents divorced when he was small and his mum took Jeremy and his brother to Australia where he was brought up. His parents re-married (his mum twice) and in total he had six half/step siblings. He now has one step sister, one step brother, two half brothers and one ‘real’ brother – but they are all really close and never use the words ‘half’ and ‘step’, which is great.
Unfortunately, he also had another sister but she died when she was 15 from an asthma attack. Jeremy moved around quite a lot in Australia before moving back to England, emigrating to New Zealand for a while and then returning back to England – obviously attending many different schools and having various numbers of jobs!
Chris arrived at 3.00pm to start Jeremy’s session. I had some work errands to run, popped to Julie’s for a coffee, went to the gym for a little workout and when I arrived home at 7.15pm, poor Chris was just leaving!!!
We have had a few more visits from Chris and only have three more to go now – one of these will also be with Graham attending. He is Chris’s boss and he comes and does an assessment of how things are going – we’ll let you know how that goes next month!!
We have been on holiday since the last diary entry – two weeks in France. We had an absolutely brilliant time and totally chilled out. We have never been so tired before we went! As mentioned before, I left work to start my own business which was quite stressful, Jeremy has been so busy at work and to be honest the adoption process (home visits, homework, and preparation groups) does totally drain you.
We were getting a bit annoyed with some people’s comments – ‘You wait till you have children of your own – then you will know what tired is!’ but the adoption process is emotionally tiring and not so much physically tiring! Anyway, we are totally re-refreshed and raring to go again now!!!!
While we were on holiday, we both read a book ‘A Child Called It’ by Dave Pelzer. This is an amazing book and we would recommend anyone to read it, especially those thinking of adopting.
The book gives a true but totally harrowing experience of a little boy growing up with his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother. It is a story of one child’s courage to survive. It is very sad but at the same time it has a very positive story to tell and made all our home visits and group sessions seem so worthwhile. We have since ordered the sequels ‘The Lost Boy’ and ‘A Man Named Dave’ – will update you next month when we have read these.
We obviously talked about our adoption journey on holiday and tried not to get too excited but did realise this may be our last summer holiday together! Jeremy’s parents (Dad and Step-Mum) kindly let us borrow their Camper Van to take to France and we therefore stayed on various campsites during our stay.
We stayed on a few sites that had nice big family-size tents and caravans and did comment how nice these would be ‘when we have our children’. When we hired bikes, many had special child seats or little trailers attached and we said ‘that will be cool when we have our children’. BUT we are not getting excited – we must wait till September!!!
Some great news for Jeremy, too – he is in touch a lot more with Debbie and Daniel and has visited Daniel and talks to him now on the telephone on a regular basis. He took him out for the day on Saturday on his own and got his first Fathers Day card. He was so chuffed and I was so pleased for him!
Things are looking good and next time I am going to go along too and Jeremy, Daniel and I are three having a day out together!! Debbie has told Daniel that Jeremy is not his ‘birth father’ but Daniel is fine – so that’s brilliant!
We are going to the CCS family picnic on Sunday so are looking forward to that – we are taking Demi and are going with Michelle and Tom and his daughter too.
Next month will be an exciting entry – we will have had our assessment with Graham and Michelle and Tom will have gone to panel. Watch this space!!!!
Clare and Jeremy
< Month 3 | Month 5 >
|
