Oh how I would love to be living in a village! Sadly not. Over the past 7 months, since she's been with us permanently, she's told me so many times I am the mum she never had. Makes my heart sing, and I tell her I don't parent her any differently to how I parent my boys. She said I was normal, but she was only just learning what 'normal' was. She truly believed, right through her childhood, that all mothers drank beer for breakfast! If all that comes out of this, with her into her adulthood, is her knowing and feeling she's had a good few years of normality, then as we say here in the UK, 'job's a good un'
