'Looking after my baby foster brother was always a top priority for me.'

Balancing my Duke of Edinburgh and fostering household responsibilities

One of the hardest things I find about living in a fostering household is how flexible you need to be with your timing. This isn't always easy for me as a birth child in a fostering household, as I have several aspects of my life that are important in different ways, like football, DofE (Duke of Edinburgh), college, and being a young carer. I prefer to have a range of different things I do, but it sometimes comes at a cost.

Due to having a full household, there are a lot of different arrangements which need to take place; this means I need to stay organised and also compromise a lot. For example, looking after my baby foster brother was always a top priority for me; I loved him to bits and enjoyed spending time with him. It was important to help my mum with him as raising a baby is extremely difficult and tiring. However, spending most of my time on him meant that other aspects of my life became more challenging to do, skills like baking were difficult to do while looking after a baby, and I'd often exhaust myself making other things like football and college work difficult to do, this is where I began to learn the importance of managing my time effectively, I accepted I weren't superhuman, and I couldn't magically balance everything all the time, so instead I built more of a schedule, thankfully I only needed to do each section of the DofE once a week, using this I managed to make a schedule where I found I did have to give up time on certain things (like cuddling with my baby foster brother) but this allowed me to get through the days easier and spend quality time with him while not being too tired. I'm grateful it's something I learnt now rather than later in life; weirdly enough, fostering and DofE, while being a chaotic mix, has taught me many important life skills.

While maintaining a schedule is important, on the other hand, I also had to be able to go against it sometimes. Life is random, and anything can happen, so at times when something unexpected happens, I have to adjust my schedule. For example, there were times when my younger foster brother would need more attention, like when he was teething or first learning to walk, I had to prioritise him at times like this, so I did side track my DofE progress, but that's okay, like I said before the DofE system is designed in a way to suit your needs and is flexible, I don't have to complete my sections before the expedition, so taking time off it occasionally didn't do my any harm but did give some positives like learning when its right to prioritise certain things and I'm glad as I made some special memories like watching my younger foster brothers first steps.

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