Friday 8 March 2013

Contact and dancing dogs

I can't believe that Jack-Jack has lived here over two months already - he'll be 9 months old next week! It feels like he's so close to standing up without support, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was an early walker. We'll have to babyproof up higher, but at least he'll toddle a bit slower than he can crawl to start off with, so he won't be quite as into everything!

We had a fantastic supervision session with our social worker Jane on Tuesday and told her about various concerns we have about Jack-Jack's progress and behaviour (mostly around reactions to contact, but also some general concerns) that we think it's important for the decision makers in his case to know about. As Jane said during the session, only foster carers see the child 24 hours a day, the social worker is never going to see many (if any) challenging behaviours during their visits, so they take our observations seriously as they're vital for court hearings/review meetings. We have a meeting with Jack-Jack's social worker on Tuesday, and she'll have hopefully spoken to Jane by then so that we can talk through things in a bit more detail. We do feel like some positive steps are being taken to improve the situation for Jack-Jack, they just seem to be happening far too slowly to have any effect yet.

Jack-Jack had his first "full" week of contact this week - all three arranged sessions went ahead for the first time. He had various reactions before and after the sessions (sadly none of them positive - our recording notes in the evening on contact days are huge compared to just a short paragraph on other days), and is completely shattered tonight.

We're all going to Crufts this weekend which will be good fun - Jack-Jack absolutely loves Lady, so I think the "discover dogs" section will be a hit, and we will probably try to watch a bit of agility or heelwork to music. It might inspire us to try and train Lady to dance with us, but it's more likely that we'll just buy her lots of treats!

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