Just us- SBI adoption story (Just me and him book 2)

Chapter 12: getting back to being a family

Kristin's POV:

We'd had a quiet weekend. Taking some time out to chill, spend time as a family and process everything that had happened. We had all decided that on the Monday we would go to our local national trust place and have a bit of a family day out. We put together a shopping list and sent Tubbo and Wilbur into the shop to get it whilst I sat outside in the car. The aim of it was to encourage a bit more independence for the boys and it worked pretty well. They came out of the shop laughing and were high spirits for the rest of our Sunday.

I now packed that food into the cool bag we were taking whilst Phil was upstairs asleep. He'd been up late with Tommy and we'd decided that it was only fair that whoever gets to sleep earlier has to wake up earlier too. Once I'd packed everything away, I began to tidy up the house. 

Since changing the play room into Tubbo's bedroom, our garage and the spare bedroom had been full of boxes of toys. We'd decided to change this over the weekend, and sorted through the toys before placing them in the drawers we'd originally had in there. Placing them where the shoe cupboard had been during the building work (against the wall of the stairs and next to the downstairs toilet) we'd been able to find a lot more space in the house and a way to organise our many board games. During this, Tommy had found a wooden train track set and refused to do much else all weekend. 

Techno soon joined in with him and we ended the weekend with a train track running round the entirety of the downstairs, including into Tubbo's bedroom. Much to his annoyance, we did eventually convince Tommy to remove the set of track from his brother's bedroom so we could close the door, allowing him to get some sleep. And whilst it pained me to leave the rest of the track out, I knew how much it being gone so suddenly would upset him, so I chose to just clean up everything else instead.

I cleaned up the whiteboard and began using the diary to fill in our week with the activities. I started with Tubbo's physio sessions, which were now designated for Thursday afternoons. I still needed to sort out Tommy's personal routines, which we'd decided we should have in place from now so that come September Tommy would hopefully go through them independently. If he needed the help, Phil or I would be there to offer it, just like with all our other boys. But we wanted independence and happiness for all of them. The colour-coded signs had gone down well, and the next step was to have on them on all the bedroom doors, not just Tommy's. As shown by the shoe cupboard, Tommy understands that if it's not his colour, it's not his. And when it is his colour, he knows it is his and he gets very excited. Sometimes Phil and I forgot that when kids don't get to have a lot of things, having stuff that was theirs and theirs only, felt amazing. It's why we never made any of our kids share rooms, unless it's better for them (we once fostered a kid for a few months who refused to sleep in a room without their baby sister). Giving them their own spaces is part of the way in which we try and give them a chance to be themselves.

As I finished with the whiteboard (and realised we had a lot on this week), I put some washing in the dryer and then folded some of the dry clothes and placed them in a basket. Phil and I had talked about the fact that the boys needed to start taking on some jobs around the house. We'd let the previous rota's go since now we had two more sons to fit in and a far more hectic life but over the weekend we'd had a family meeting about it and agreed on everyone's jobs.

Tommy couldn't stand the vacuum, and neither could Techno, so Wilbur said he was happy to vacuum the house on Monday evening's when Techno is normally at his driving lesson and Tommy has his music lesson. It was agreed that Phil or I would clean the bathrooms because we were not happy at the prospect of leaving toxic cleaning materials with any of the boys, even if they were 'old enough'. Techno made the point that he'd like something that would be easy to remember and clear when he needed to do it. So it's now his job to put the correct colour bins out for the bin men and to bring them in once they have been cleared. He's now got a copy of the bin schedule on his phone, on his bedroom wall and on the wall right next to the whiteboard.