The beginning of our journey into fostering, adopting and disability

January 1992 began our family journey into the world of fostering and the world of parenting a child with a disability.  Two months before we saw an advertisement in the local paper reading something along the lines of  "wanted good home for eight month old baby girl with special needs" - well how could anyone not respond to that!  So respond we did and after going through the fostering application and necessary checks this beautiful 10 month old baby came into our lives......and now 27 years later she is still a huge part of our lives.
Growing up I thought it would be awesome to get married, have kids of my own, and one day after that was achieved I thought it would be cool to adopt a baby with Down syndrome.  I had a plan that I thought was going to work for me and of course would work for the future hubby!  Along came the future hubby and surprisingly he agreed that he was ok with my plan - must have been true love!
On stumbling across the ad in the newspaper my plans changed!  And I was ok with that.  Fantastic I thought - if I am going to be home with this baby we may as well start having some of our own so we got on with the business!  And after eight years of trying it had come to feel like a business - a business on the verge of bankruptcy - actually more like a job - you know one of those jobs that you do just for the pay packet at the end of the week and not because you're passionate about it.  Infertility, I learnt, can suck the passion right out of everything.  No need for those passion killer undies as my Mum used to call those waist high knickers! Trying to get pregnant became a job; something that needed to be done at just the right moment.  There's not much room for passion in that!
After a year or so of "trying" we decided to put our names into the pool for adoption.  Again we had to go through a thorough assessment to qualify to adopt.  I understand that process but it is hard when you are at a really low point in your life, unable to achieve what 'everyone else" can achieve without even trying, and then you have to be assessed to see if you are ok to be a parent.  Thankfully we passed that test although in hindsight my kids might ask how! We wrote a book about who we were and our dreams for a child, ticked the boxes of gender and whether we would adopt a child with a disability,  and one day in 1994 an incredible couple offered us the most selfless gift of being parents to their little boy.  And not surprisingly we said yes!  On hubby's birthday in September 1994 I flew home with our nearly two week old son.  On the plane an air hostess asked me how old my baby was and after finding out that he was only two weeks she told me she thought I looked great for having recently given birth.  Every part of me wanted to tell her it was just good genes, sensible diet, the way I treated my body like a temple but I just couldn't bring myself to do that so I did the obvious and told her he was adopted and that I was taking him home to meet his daddy and it was daddy's birthday.  With that she asked if she could show him off to the other flight attendants, the pilot and everyone else on the plane.  Of course I said and off she went.  When we got off the plane most of the flight crew and passengers followed and all sang happy birthday to Daddy and watched as he met his wee son for the first time.
Finally in November of 1998 our family was complete with the birth of our favourite biological child - her words!  With a little help from technology we became pregnant after eight long years of infertility and we now had a favourite foster child, favourite adopted child, and a favourite biological child  - although now they are all adults!
This fantastic bunch and the journey we have been on for the past 27 and a half years has been a journey of  love, joy, frustration, sadness, scariness, excitement. Its been rewarding, overwhelming, fulfilling, crazy, a privilege, humbling, exhausting, at times it has been really lonely BUT I wouldn't change the make-up of our family for anything.  Oh there is a lot of things I would dearly love to change especially in the arena of disability and while part of my reason for writing this blog is to share our journey and the things I learnt along the way it is also as a sounding board for the frustrations we come across in ensuring our young people are supported to live a good life and to bring awareness to some of the issues that are faced by young people and their families.
I hope you will join me on this journey and maybe find some encouragement and laughter along the way.  Until next time.....