Andy's birthday BBQ and Eco-maps..

We had a lovely barbeque for Andy's 46th birthday. My friend Marney 'twitters' in Haiku. Here is her succinct description of the occasion:

Birthday barbecue./Well toasted friendship./Delicious conversation!

I am now avoiding cleaning up the devastation caused by this highlight in the social calendar by blogging. Andy is avoiding it by sleeping...

So. Eco Maps.

For the uninitiated, an 'eco-map' is a diagram created by potential adoptive parents, detailing the local and social resources available once the child / children arrive and the sanity of the parents begins to depart. Some would say that embarking on this process in the first place proves that it packed its bags and left long ago. But let's not go there...

Anyway. This map is supposed to include things like local amenities such as parks, play groups, swimming pools. And a description of our social network and the support we can expect to get from it. We need to produce this at our next meeting with the social worker in two and half weeks time.

My initial thoughts were that it is probably not possible to say exactly what sort of support we will get from people until it actually happens. Neither will we know exactly what sort of support we want. In the end, we will need to create our support network as we go along. I also don't feel terribly comfortable about asking people what help, if any, they intend to provide when we have kids. However, we have to produce this thing and I'm guessing it's not a great idea just to make it up.

With that in mind, I made the decision to actually ask our friends what they thought. The first person I asked took my seriously and was just fantastic. She is prepared, she says, to be available to come round for an hour in crisis moments and provide support and help us calm things down. Perhaps look after one child whilst we deal with crisis with another.

Brilliant! Not only will that look excellent on our eco-map, but, more importantly, it will be incredibly helpful to know that she's prepared to do that.

Emboldened by this conversation, I asked our dear friends gathered round the barbeque.

"Are you allowed to say that people will pray for you?"

"We've got loads of kids videos you can have."

Not quite what I was hoping for the form, but still...not bad...

"We'll be at hand to tell you 'we told you so' "

"...and 'We did warn you...'"

"Best of all, because we don't have any kids, we'll be able to give you advice."

"And tell you where you're going wrong..."

Oh well. Maybe at a party with beer was not the best moment to pick. Never mind. I think there's a park round the corner.