We have been having great fun, over the last few months, preparing things for the children to get before they meet us. We did two sets of things in the end.
Firstly, we worked with our brilliant friends Marney and Stephen to produce a little story featuring us and two little monster puppets, called Pim and Bibble.
When thinking about how to introduce ourselves, we were pondering the ways that young children generally approach meeting new people. We notice that directly introducing oneself to a small child quite often seems to alarm them. They generally seem to like to observe for a bit. Check people out first. That being the case, we wanted to allow space for the kids to watch from the sidelines, as it were. So we produced a story which just shows us interacting with the puppets. Giving the kids the chance to see us and our home without all the baggage of knowing that we were going to be their parents.
The other thing we did was two more traditional photo books, with pictures of us and our house, which specifically introduce us as 'Mummy and Daddy'. We managed to get hold of some talking photo albums, so that we could record messages to go with the pictures.
Because we were doing something slightly different from the norm, my major concern was that we would have put all that effort into creating a carefully staged, 2 part introduction only for social services to take everything to the foster home at once after matching panel and the kids not to see the DVD before the books.
I felt very out of control of the whole thing.
The boys' social worker suggested we bring everything to matching panel. But I sent the DVD in the post first, with a long explanation as to why we wanted them to see the DVD first and how it really wouldn't matter if it happened before panel, because it doesn't mention us as parents, and if the match wasn't approved, they'd just be the owners of a slightly random kids DVD.
Delighted to say that they agreed!
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