Our VA has lots of training for prospective adopters and for adopters who have children placed with them. The latest training session that we were invited to was on Music.

The training was held in the ‘usual’ training room at the VA’s offices. There were chairs set up for about 20 people; Hubby and I were there early as we had had a meeting with our s/w just before the training. Gradually the seats filled with familiar as well as a few unfamiliar faces.

The trainer, who is an adoptive parent herself, arrived with a guitar, a portable speaker, and a bag of toys.

One of the sad things about adopting an older child, I think, is that we will miss out on some of the good bits of the younger ages (I’m not at all sad to be missing nappies/diapers!). One of those activities, of course, is nursery rhymes. We learned in this session, though, that because of the emotional delay that is common in children with attachment disorder, that we are encouraged to do those activities!

We listened to some mp3’s and had to think about how the music made us feel. Really, it was just to reinforce the fact that music can affect emotions — it can excite us or calm us down. And we can make use of that when we have our children.

We learned a few nursery rhymes. I don’t have a great memory and decided on the night that I would YouTube nursery rhymes to learn them in my own time!

All in all, there wasn’t a huge amount of content but the message of the session was very clear. I get to do nursery rhymes!!