It’s been a while since I last wrote a proper blog post about “my life”, so perhaps a coffee break while sitting in London this morning is the perfect opportunity.
Main observations…
Your children tend to become the focus of everything you do
It’s easy for that focus to swamp everything else
Everything else includes each other
There will never be enough money, so don’t try to make enough
I fell foul of the last point above pretty dramatically. Working a day job, and then returning home to do freelance work pretty much excluded me from everything for a couple of months. Sure, the extra money was great, but it also meant that the last few hours of each day that I might have spent with my other half were not spent with her.
I also discovered that sitting in an office chair for something approaching 18 hours a day gives you pretty drastic back problems. Wii Bowling seems to have corrected that (stop laughing).
The kids are doing great - perhaps at the expense of myself and W - but we are willing to make that sacrifice, and always will. The eldest is in year 3 at school now, and really starting to flourish. We knew we were doing something right when she started rebelling. Her tactics for staying up an extra ten minutes are really rather clever, and her bookish moments are clung to by W, who often sees herself in her.
The middle girl is at school now (in “reception”), and doing wonderfully. She’s itching to learn to read and write, and we suspect may be the brightest by quite a long way. We are continually amazed at the speed she learns things. Unfortunately her obvious intellect also means she’s the most devious, naughty, and unruly. Our secret weapon against her claimed ignorance of why (insert child) is (insert distress) is a threat to throw her Peter Pan costume in the rubbish. She loves Peter seemingly more than life itself.
The youngest charms everybody who meets her - something to do with curly blonde hair, a distracted gaze, and the cheekiest grin in the known universe. We wonder if she is on the same planet much of the time. While playing with toys she always seems to be acting out disasters - we wonder just what she saw in her formative months. Her growing confidence with speech is exciting - new words are tried out nearly every day now, and letters that could not be said last week are flowing this week.
Myself and W are doing okay. We are both tired pretty much all the time, and still catch each other during falling down moments. Everybody around us seems to think we are super-parents or something - including the majority of the social services, and those who have travelled the adoption journey with us. The reality is that we try perhaps too hard at times, and not hard enough at other times. We have not found a balance, and probably never will.
We plod on from day to day. We do our best. So far, our best seems to be good enough.