For the next two years someone will pay us an announced visit every three months. This first one covered a general overview of what these visits entail.
They observe our daughter in her environment, with a trained eye, to see how she develops, and we talk about her average schedule, measure her height, weight and look over her skin without a shirt.
Her face is relaxed, happy, bright. She whined for not getting her way with something, but the complete array of emotions in the context of home speaks safety.
The social worker asked about how her tantrums manifest, and to not tell her that they don’t happen, and how we manage. It dawned on me that she sometimes screams of frustration, “aaaaa!”a controlled but yell nonetheless. There might be a correlation with the fact that I also raise my voice when the glass is full. Never both at the same time. After I let her let off steam I ask her “Did you finish? And she answered with the most poised look “I believe so”. We talked about that too. All too normal.
The social worker said that it takes usually the same amount of time to adapt and feel fully at home, as long as the child has been in the system. Jackie beats the odds. She was also said to speak very eloquently for her age, grammatically and contextually correct. Complex phrases and expressive words. This is even more surprising as we speak english at home.
This morning, the day after the visit, which we celebrated with a date at a french quiche restaurant, she woke up singing loudly “la-la-la, it’s weekend, i’ll watch cartoons!” (in english!) then in romanian: “I lost my voice! [silence]…no i didn’t! just kidding”