Perhaps in time the novelty of this will pall, and I’m sure that for most people this is nothing out of the ordinary, but this morning when I went in S- was on her feet, bouncing up and down in her cot, grinning away to herself.
Once I got her down and out of her grobag, she raced across the room. ‘Aha,’ she said and started tugging, hesitantly at first, on the straps of a hessian bag positioned just above the level of her head on one of her shelves. She looked at me questioningly.
I thought for a minute. Actually, it’s more truthful to say that I didn’t think at all. ‘Go on, pull,’ I said.
I could feel my face crinkling, you see, and the fact that for some reason I still can’t fathom we’d put a load of her old baby crockery in the hessian bag was not really uppermost in my mental processes.
Well, I did say it was first thing in the morning!
‘Poo,’ she said. And the bag duly came tumbling down. Amazingly none of the [non-dangerous, as revealed by later, guilty examination] crockery fell out.
‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘Ooohh.’
I think sometimes that I write this blog to show how special she is. And she is, of course she is. But she’s also joyously, fantastically, just like other kids.
January 23, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Hi, I am not an adoptive parent, but I do have four children (aged 6-19).
I enjoyed your account of the Play Group. Some people are better suited to these type of gatherings than others. I have done them but I have to say that I def have to be in the right frame of mind for them. Perhaps the guy had been talked into going or had had a bad day? Maybe when/if he turns up next week – he’ll be crawling around on the floor playing cars with every child in sight? He perhaps felt self-conscious playing with his child properly in front of others and is great with her at home?
But I found that some parents never wanted to talk. I wondered why they went to the groups – they’d keep their eyes down the whole time and only talk to their own child. Perhaps they were just shy? But generally the men were more talkative and so much more interesting – less obsessed with nappies and the competitive aspect of parenting and more willing to talk about other things. We always had two or three men attend the baby group when my son was little.
Do you find the women chat to you OK? Or do you feel awkward?
January 23, 2008 at 9:10 pm
That’s an interesting question. I tend to find that women don’t really talk to me at the groups and activities I go to – except where it’s adoptive kids only, and there I already had an ‘in’ as G- had met some of the parents. But I’ve still to try quite a few groups in the areas, so things might be different there.
Actually the really interesting thing is that some of the women I know who’ve adopted say that it’s difficult for them to break the ice at non-adoptive groups too. Is that because many of the people at these events already know each other from ante natal classes and the like?
This ties in with another post of mine – Help – where I talk about the need for support from people who have an insight into the particular needs of adoption.