Butterflies & Penguins

Following our very positive visit from the placing LA and ahead of our matching panel date in early November we have homework... to prepare a couple of bits and pieces for our baby to see and play with during the time between panel and introductions to help him become familiar with our voices and faces.

The first thing is something that many adopters have used before and our SW highly recommended, it's the Tomy Talking Photo Album. This fun album can hold eight photos and a short voice message to accompany each, it lights up, plays a cute noise when you open and close it and has tactile page tabs. It's perfect for our little boy at 9 months as even thought he won't understand what we are saying he play with it and hear us over and over again.

The next item we were asked to prepare is a video message, and it's harder than you might think trying to make a video for a baby. What should we say? What should we do? I posted a message asking others who had done this before on the New Family Social message boards and received loads of really great ideas and inspiration. One kind adopter even went as far as to send us a copy of the DVD they had made previously which was just brilliant.

In the end we decided not to focus too much on making a suitable video for his age range and just to send something that had lots of colourful pictures in as well as our voices and faces so that it can just be left playing in the background and hopefully will just reinforce we he is hearing from the butterfly album.

So... our video package consists of us reading along 'And Tango Makes Three', a book we just love and actually bought back in February based on a true story of two male penguins in a New York zoo adopting a baby penguin. We start of with a little hello to camera and then turn the pages of the book whilst images from the pages also appear on screen as closeups. We decided to also buy a soft penguin toy so that we could hold it in the video and then give the DVD, book and the toy to the foster carers so that he can see the penguin on screen and play with it at the same time, plus the foster carer can also read along with the book making the whole experience more interactive for him.

One tip which we also received from another New Family Social member was to give the toy our scent before sending it so that he is familiar with our smell before meeting us and also, to wear the same clothes as worn in the video so everything is really familiar.

Homework now completed the next even in our diary is our 'child appreciation day' (of sorts) which we are really excited about as it's another step closer to panel. With slightly older children these days are a chance for adopters to meet key figures in the child's life, like the foster carers, doctors and maybe even teachers to get a full understanding of their character and to ask any questions etc - also for them to meet you. Though with a younger baby there are less people to meet so it will just be the foster carers and health advisor this time.

After this week we only have just over a month to panel... exciting times ahead. We are hopeful that introductions will start middle of November all going well and we might even welcome our little boy home by the end of November in time for his very first Christmas.