Returns

G’s niece turned up yesterday. She phoned her foster carer and asked her to come and pick her up, which the foster carer did. Apparently she was rather filthy and she had a bath and something to eat and then a couple of hours later went out again and disappeared again. There was always the risk of that, but the foster carer can do nothing to restrain her and she can’t lock the doors etc so she has no choice but to let her go off if she wants to do that. I think if this carries on then G’s niece will end up in secure accommodation.

I suppose in some ways the dilemma is that obviously we want to know she is ok, but we don’t want to give her lots of attention for doing something bad. She would be much better off with the foster carers who are very nice, tolerant and patient people and would give her much better life chances, but she would rather live in somewhat more precarious circumstances. But if people seem to take more of an interest in her when she is being bad then that might actually encourage her to be naughty, which doesn’t seem right. But then it also doesn’t seem right to ignore her when she is being bad, particularly if she might be in some form of danger. I’m not really sure what the best thing to do is, but we are just trying to be consistent and to be positive when we deal with her, rather than giving her a hard time for not going home etc. Does it help? I’m not really sure...

Anyway, it was my nephew’s birthday this weekend and so we went to his birthday party and ate lots of cake and had a nice time. My father was there, who drove me mad as ever. Now it seems that he is suddenly a life long Celtic support football, despite not actually liking football and also never having showed any interest in Celtic before. G is a big Celtic fan and so now my father talks about how “their” team has been doing recently, which I find odd (and so does G I think). I also spent about an hour and a half trying to fix my father’s new DVD player, which he bought this week to replace the broken one. Every single part of setting it up had been done wrong, including plugging the TV aerial directly into the TV (missing out the DVD player), which might explain why it wasn’t possible to get any form of picture through it. If I had set it up from scratch I think it would have taken me about 10 minutes, but I had to undo all the things that were wrong and then reset it all up and it took absolutely ages. It meant we didn’t get home until quite late last night and so that was not the best end to the weekend. Grr...