Blimey - it's quiet! I am sitting in my lounge and all I can hear is the tapping of my lap top keys and the wind blowing the shrubs in the garden. I am also sitting and drinking a hot cup of coffee!! Yes, it is that time of year again when we all let out a collective sigh, wave our charges off and, whilst we love our children to pieces, thank goodness that our forefathers had the insight to make education compulsory!

A big pat on the back to everyone for surviving the hols and hopefully you have all come out of it all relatively unscathed. From our own perspective, we had a really nice 'break' - a few dodgy moments as usual but overall I would say that us and, more importantly, the kids had a really good time. Did loads, and thanks to our fab direct payment carers, the whole process ran a lot more smoothly that normal. It's amazing the difference that an extra pair of hands can make.

We also spent a fun two weeks in France but, as we have found before, a change of environment presents its own issues. Michael coped really well but as usual had to develop his own little routines, invariably involving shutting doors and turning on and off and on and off light switches! That is cool though as we know what to expect now and subconsciously we found ourselves shutting doors too!! Elise unfortunately coped far worse than Michael and the challenging side of her behaviour came to the fore, big time, especially in the first week. Even though we have had her for three years now (we adopted her when she was two) in the whole scheme of things, this is a relatively short time and she is still very insecure. Because she has fitted so well into our family and is so happy, we have almost forgotten that she is adopted and inadvertently downplay the associated problems. Even though logically she knew that she was coming home with us, emotionally, she was not, hence the behaviours. Trouble is, even though we know the reasons for it all, it doesn't alleviate the situation and I can freely admit that my patience does wear thin at times!

Not to worry though - as someone recently said to me, we are not robots and as usual, we worked through it and all was fine at the end. As she stood in front of me this morning in her new school uniform (the second one of the morning as she managed to spill milk all down the first attempt!) looking as proud as Punch, it really hit home to me how much she has come on in the last three years. Whether your child is just starting 'big school' or are old timers, lets hope they have a good year. I am going to go and put on the radio now - it is too quiet!!