I have wondered increasingly frequently over the last year or two if to write a blog at all any more - or at least if to write a “personal” blog. Thoughts surrounding this have been magnified recently with the completion of the adoption order on the children - meaning they are now ours. Their names have changed. We are finally a real, “proper” family.
We can finally make decisions about how much we choose to share with the world at large - if we choose to ever show any of the thousands of photos we have taken in public. At this point in time I would tend to say “no way”. I even worry about the privacy controls in photo sharing sites such as Flickr and PicasaWeb - will they ever be hacked?
On top of the natural concern to protect your own children, we also have to face the issues surrounding adoption - do we want the birth parents of the children to be able to easily find them? In the early days I was reluctant to even share their gender and age out of paranoia that some huge search would be going on. It’s easy to forget the reasons most children end up in care - the same reasons that nobody will be searching for them.
On more than one occasion we have had to ask friends and family to retract photos from public forums with our children in. It’s not been easy at all.
I’m guessing as the next year or two rolls on, we will become more relaxed. Little by little we will let those outside of our closest friends learn more about our little charges, and share a little more in our great adventure together.
The time before children entered our lives seems very distant now. It would be wrong to say that we don’t miss the independence and freedom we once had - we do. Going shopping on our own has become a rare luxury that lands the other with a tiresome tug-of-war between the attention fighting antics of the children. Having a night out requires military planning, timing, and the coordinating skills of a project manager. While it sounds funny, when you’re in the thick of it, it’s not.
There is another side to our chosen situation though. A side where small voices shout “Daddy’s Home!” in exploding tones as I walk through the back door. Where I am left for Dead at the sound of the front door when Mum has been to the corner shop - who is then bundled to the floor with hugged legs. There are the weekend mornings when little faces appear around the bedroom door, and uncertain little people climb onto the bed for a cuddle before heading downstairs for breakfast with Dad. There are the little victories, the things they learn, the paintings, the drawings, marking their height on the wall, and a thousand other things.
It’s hard to describe to those without children not only the immense impact they have upon your life, but also the payoff. How do you describe the pride you feel when a little girl who can only just recognise foam letters in the bath manages to spell her entire name with them while you are fetching towels? Or when her older sister peddles her bike for the first time, and turns ecstatically to you screaming “did you see! did you see!”. Or when the youngest manages to go through the night without an accident, and proudly stands next to her bed in the morning proclaiming “look Dad - no wee!”