Bidding social services farewell
We had a final "official" meeting with our social worker this morning, and bade warewell to the amazing woman who has accompanied us along the journey from being prospective adopters to somewhat experienced parents. If you are a recent reader of my blog, a little back story is probably required. After two years fighting our way through the red tape, being repeatedly interviewed, and having every aspect of our life turned inside-out and upside-down, last February we became the adoptive parents of three little girls. Our big old empty house became a big old noisy, untidy, crazy house overnight. In the early days the spectre of social workers was ever present - weekly visits of both our own and the children's social workers became bi-weekly, monthly, and then stopped. Today marked the very end of that withdrawal. It feels quite odd. As much as we yearned for independence from the meddling hand of the state in the early days, the increasingly infrequent visits by our social worker became the return of an old friend - somebody with perspective that remembered us before children. She is now gone. We now stand alongside the variety of parents we have come to know through school, brownies, and work as equals; with no catch net. In some ways we are more fortunate than many; our exposure to the potential issues we may have had to confront caused us to become better informed about attachment, loss, and the behaviour of children. Like all parents, we know our kids. We know real tears from fake, we know the sound of delight, the murmerings of disappointment, and the silence of fear. There is, and will always be a part of our children that is not ours though; the time they spent with their birth family, and their various other siblings spread around the country. Who knows - perhaps our having dealt with that thought from day one will stand us in good stead when they one day fly the nest. Our children are never really "ours", are they. From the moment they begin making decisions for themself, answering back, protesting, and manipulating us, they are very much their own person and we are just along for their ride.
Over the course of the last month, I have been investing a little more effort than normal into both writing hopefully interesting posts for my personal blog at Cheese and Beans, with the idea that I could look back after a month or so, and reflect. It's an odd thing to do because I don't have a huge narcissistic streak in me, but the availability of free tools to give easy data makes the task of reflection a lot easier than it might have been (read: I am lazy, and this is an easy post to write). Publishing the nitty gritty will probably be interesting to those who are just starting to write online; to show the kind of audience you might garner if you exploit obvious avenues. It does come at a cost though, and I will get to that towards the end. 
Today curiousity finally got the better of me, and I installed a rather wonderful application called "Stellarium" on my netbook, to figure out which moon was which. Rolling back the clock to about the right time-frame that we were in the back garden, the magic box of tricks tells us the following (click on the pic for a bigger version via Flickr); 
