👧🏻👧🏻 TREE 631: JG – daughters 2 and 3

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Not long after we started i61 Church a teenage girl started attending. She was living with her sister for reasons that are her story, not mine. She was sleeping in the living room because her sister didn’t have a spare bedroom. Her life was stressful and starting to be a bit out of control. She got on well with our family and started spending Sunday afternoons at our house.

We thought it would be nice if she could stay over with us sometimes and have some space for herself. I moved my office to the pub where the church met and we converted the room into a bedroom. She started staying for the weekend. Then she moved in with us. Then the court gave us joint parental responsibility for her and we were parenting a teenager four years before we planned to.

We gave her a bedtime and other boundaries that we thought would be useful. They were. She regained her focus at school, got a job when she was 16. Went to university straight after high school. Came home for the holidays. Graduated. Then she was off living her grown-up life.

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Our youngest daughter joined the family when she was 17 months old. Christine and I had been planning to adopt from the beginning of our marriage. When our unexpected teenager was nearing the end of university and moved out, we had room for another kid

we started the adoption process in November 2011, a few weeks before our soon-to-be daughter was born. We went to training, had our lives forensically examined by a social worker, went to more training, got approved as adopters, got matched with a little girl that three previous adopters had turned down because she was deaf, got approved to adopt her. Two weeks after the approval and 18 months after we started the process she joined our family.

Her story is very much still being written. I’m not going to tell my part of it for a few or several years.

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Bringing two outside kids into your family seems like a big thing to a lot of people. It is, but both Christine and I grew up with parents who constantly helped and looked after people outside their immediate families. It didn’t seem odd to us at all. It was the natural extension of how we were raised. I’m grateful for the hospitality and care that were part of Christine’s and my childhood. Without it, we probably wouldn’t have had the privilege of welcoming these two wonderful girls into our family.

Quentin Blake is my number one illustration hero. Slimbridge Wetlands Centre is 15 minutes from my house and they are doing a major Quentin Blake exhibition this summer. Christine and I visited Sunday then we fed some demanding geese. Heaven!

Grow slowly
Jeff