From morning routines to bedtime rituals, foster families provide the vital stability and support that every child deserves to help transform lives.
We had the opportunity to speak with foster parents Sharon and Pete, hearing first-hand about their typical day in the life of fostering.
How does your day start typically?
Well if you've got kids probably your day would be exactly the same as our day, it wouldn't be any different.
We get up early anytime between 5am / 6am our youngest child normally wakes up around about 6am, Pete does his breakfast. The older two children will generally get up around about 7am, they do their own breakfast which is normally toast and 8:15am they all go and brush their teeth. They've normally done their hair and everything by then so then it is off to school at 8:30am which is 10 minutes away.
On a Wednesday and Friday the children have various after school clubs and either myself or Pete will collect the children and coordinate who needs to be where, when and with who.
On a Thursday, two of children have gymnastics so it is a case of Pete and I tag teaming and managing arrangements as we prepare food, feed the children and drop / pick them up. At 7pm our youngest child will have a shower and get ready for bed as the other two children come in they will shower shortly after and everyone is in bed for around 7.30pm. We tend to go to bed early too sometimes around 8pm.
Day to day there is the foster parent recordings which I do daily, logging children’s moments, milestones and what we have been up to. Then there is the washing we have more washing than anyone really should have. I don't know what they do at school with their uniform.
We normally find that everything sort of joins into one week. So we have three weeks where we're quieter and then the Local Authority Review, support, training seems to all happen all in the same week, so we seem to have one week where it's absolutely chaotic and we get nothing done at all at home. We do find time for ourselves though we have to, we have a day date one day a week and that's normally a Friday. Recently we went out with FCA and did a sea swim, it was lovely.
Weekends are also busy, Saturday is mostly always contact with pre-agreed arrangements in place for the children to spend time with their birth family. This can take three – four hours so one of us will do that. Whoever's at home will look after the child(ren) who hasn’t got contact and will do something like maybe take the dogs for a walk, go down the beach, go to the park, kick a football about. We always plan something to do all together on a Sunday.
This is our typical week and really not that much different to most families.
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