The case of Alan and Judith Kilshaw has revealed what can happen when the interests of adults are put before those of the children. An adoptive couple who most definitely do put their children first are Christina and Stuart Smith. However, before you read their heart-warming story, Christina asked Adoption-net to point out that she is not a saint. "Yes, I do yell at my children. I have been known to swear and, yes, sometimes my children do run out of knickers," she said.

by Becky Morris

The day Christina and Stuart Smith went to pick up the four children they were to adopt, they taped a message to their fridge for the youngsters to see when they arrived. 'Welcome home,' it read. 'We are your forever family.'

Alice, who was then eight, took one look at it and said: "No you're f***ing well not." It was not, the Smiths agreed, a promising start.

"When we got the go-ahead, the children came for a three-day visit and behaved beautifully," says Christina, 44.

Then they went back to their foster home to pack and say goodbye. We were so excited about them coming back the following week, but when they did all hell broke loose.

"It was as though they were testing us to see if we really did love them as much as we said we did.

"On the drive home to Brighton from their foster home in the Midlands, I literally had to climb from the front to the back seat of the car on the motorway to get them under control. They had pulled the headrests off and were shredding the insides."

In their first week at the Smiths' five-bedroom home, the children pulled the taps off the kitchen sink, put Blu-Tack into all the house locks, urinated all over the bathroom floor, and turned the washing machine to boil wash and punctuated every sentence with appalling language.

"It was shattering," says Christina, with a giggle that betrays the sense of humour that has kept her going throughout. "But we decided immediately that the only possible way we could keep going was to insist on good behaviour and not budge an inch.

"So if one of the children peed on the bathroom floor, we had to drag them kicking and screaming up the stairs and make them clean it up, even if it meant holding their hand to make them dip the sponge in the bucket."

Today, it is hard to believe that such bright, smiling and impeccably mannered children could possibly have behaved so badly. They are polite and jolly, with the little girls in pinafore dresses and the boys eager to show off their newly learned card tricks.

Rosettes for pony riding hang on the walls besides paintings by the children. Alice, the eldest, is full of pride at singing in the church choir on Sundays.

But such a happy family life has not been achieved without a succession of disturbing cries that most parents - thankfully - never have to face. The only thing that got her through, says Christina, is that she loved the children from the moment she met them.

"When we first saw them at their home, Kirsty, who was then seven, took one look at me and wet herself with nerves," she says, sitting at her scrubbed-pine kitchen table, watching her now-cheerful children clattering out into the garden.

"Alice the oldest, shoved her face right up to mine and stared unblinkingly into my eyes. Max, who was five, sat rocking in his chair. When a meal was served they fell on the food like locusts, cramming their mouths, while William, the littlest, stood on a chair.

"It was clear they had never had a lesson in table manners in their lives and I knew that raising them would be an enormous challenge.

"Nevertheless, I felt an overwhelming strong love for them. I thought they were truly beautiful and felt an extraordinarily powerful bond between us." A bond that today, three-and-a-half trying years down the line, is, she says, stronger then ever.	'It seems very cruel to split them up'

Christina and her husband Stuart, a lithographic printer, first met the children during an emotional two-hour visit to the youngsters' foster home near Birmingham.

Afterwards, the couple went back to their hotel and telephoned their parents to tell them that, at long last, they were going to be grandparents.

Both Christina and Stuart were in tears. It was the end of a long, and, especially for Christina, harrowing adoption process.

They had entered the adoption maze because Christina was born with a congenital abnormality of her reproduction organs. She spent her 20s undergoing more than 25 unsuccessful operations to help her conceive, and had six ectopic pregnancies and two miscarriages.

At 32 she had a hysterectomy, but the years of lost babies and infertility were so stressful that they destroyed her previous marriage to a farmer named Charlie.

Happily, she married Stuart nine years ago and he wholeheartedly supported her desire to adopt, particularly because a genetic kidney disorder ran in his family.

But still bad luck dogged Christina's path. When she was 35, her identical twin sister, Tisha, had suffered breast cancer. When she revealed this to the social workers, they were adamant that this meant she could not adopt because she too was at risk.

"It was a hurdle I was absolutely determined to jump," says Christina. With characteristic determination, she had both her healthy breasts removed in a radical mastectomy in 1995.

And so, finally, Stuart and Christina met Alice, now 11, Kirsty, nine, Max, eight, and William, seven, in the summer of 1997. The couple were fresh from the rigorous social services vetting procedure, a six-week adoption course and weekly visits from social workers.

Unusually, they wanted to adopt a sibling group. "I knew I wanted lots of children, so why wait?" says Christina. "Besides, large groups of brothers and sisters find it very hard to find homes. It seems very cruel to split them up."

Disturbed, undisciplined and craving love, the children were, by any standards, a handful. Christina feels honour bound not to reveal too much about what the children had gone through with their biological parents.

Suffice to say that their life had been so appalling they were taken into care in 1994 by social services against their biological mother's will. Since then, they had been with a foster mother. But today, the Smiths are a lesson in how patience, love and sheer determination can overturn the most inauspicious of beginnings. The children have, quite simply, been given another chance.	'We stuck up posters all over the house covered in swear words'

"At the beginning we used a lot of reverse psychology," says Christine. "When William started screaming in Sainsbury's, I lifted him high up in the air so the whole supermarket could hear him...he soon quietened down.

"And when Alice insisted on using bad language, we stuck up posters all over the house covered in swear words and used to insist that she repeated every word 20 times. She soon got fed up with it."

One day Kirsty, then eight, announced that she intended to have a baby as soon as she left school. "How will you afford it?" asked Christina. "I'll steal," came the reply.

The next day Christina put the children into the car for a day trip to Devon, where they walked around the perimeter fence of Dartmoor Prison - a sobering experience.

And when the children threw food over themselves, Christina did the same - and took the children out for a walk with her hair covered in baked beans.

"I was praying I wouldn't meet anyone I knew. And so, of course, were they, which is why it worked. We laugh about it now."

But along with the discipline there has always been the offer of unconditional love. Christmas was a time of fun and excitement, with the children baking their own mince pies, some of which were left out for Father Christmas along with the requisite glass of sherry and carrots for the reindeer.

The children now go riding once a week and, as well as a large garden, the family has an allotment where the brothers and sisters delight in growing flowers and vegetables.

All the children are in Cubs or Brownies and attend church and Sunday school every week. They are, finally, having the sort of idyllic, old-fashioned childhood they once could not even have imagined.

"The children had missed out on the everyday normality of a loving family home," says Christina. "They had never eaten in a room with an adult present and had no idea what a pudding was.

"They'd never eaten a banana or an orange and didn't know how to dress themselves. I had to tell them how to peel an orange and explain to Alice that vests go on under dresses, not over them.

"Max had such a bad speech impediment that he was practically incomprehensible. His foster mother told me frankly that she didn't bother trying to understand him, just let the others tell her what he wanted."

It has been hard work - the couple have taken just two nights off since the children arrived - but neither has a single regret.

Stuart, quiet man with a dry sense of humour, says: "People say 'Oh, you are good to take them on,' but to us these are our children and so naturally we do our very best for them.

"Yes, it's hard work, yes, we have to wait until the children have gone to bed to have a quiet chat with each other. But we've never had a cross word between us and the children have fulfilled out lives in ways we could never have dreamed of."

In fact, the Smiths have made such a success of their new family that they are planning to adopt another child. This time, a baby with Down's Syndrome, who they hope will be joining their family this year. "I think it would be wonderful for the children to have a new baby to care for, one that needs their love and support. It seems like the most natural thing to do next," says Christina.	'Kirsty said: Why didn't you come and get me sooner?'

"The children have had time to think about it, and if just one had said no we wouldn't have gone ahead. But they are all for it. I am absolutely sure that we can cope. We're very excited."

Christina says that having the four children has made her happy beyond all expectation. "I lost eight longed-for babies in my 20s. Of course, each was a terrific bereavement. But these children, too, came to us bereft.

"There is a tremendous sense of relief and thankfulness on both sides that we have found each other. As Kirsty said to me the other day, almost crossly 'Why didn't you come and get me sooner?'

"It's hard for her to accept that she had to go through such a disrupted and difficult time as a little girl, but I tell her at least we did come for them."

While the children do have scrapbooks of their early lives stored away in the attic, it is a topic they do not touch on often.

"They find it so upsetting, they actually tried to destroy the scrapbooks, tearing out pages and crossing things out. It's clearly tremendously painful for them - and for me, too.

"They begged me to throw the books away but I have stored them in case they change their minds later on," says Christina.

For a year the children were with the Smiths 'on approval', waiting for the final go-ahead for adoption. "I feared every day that they would be taken away from us," says Christina.

"We were under heavy scrutiny from the social services, which is only right and proper, but the day the children became legally ours was a huge relief and celebration."

And they day after they were legally adopted, Christina and Stuart took them out of school.

"The children were struggling at school and being there was making them feel even more acutely that they were odd and not good enough.

"I knew I could do a better job teaching them myself as I'd worked for years teaching and caring for mentally handicapped adults. We didn't dare risk home education before the children were legally ours as we didn't want to rock the boat."

They are educated in a book-lined, toy-filled room in the Smiths' home, where Christina starts every day with vigorous exercises and makes every lesson a practical, useful one.

"We integrate our learning into the everyday life of the family, so it is very informal, with written tasks in the morning and more practical activities such as cooking and gardening after lunch.

"Alice is a very slow learner and has problems with the simplest maths - adding two and five is a struggle. Max's speech problem is improving daily.

"He also has a sort of mental problem. He becomes fixated on repeating the same jokes and anecdotes. I think perhaps the other two are not affected, but only time will tell.

"But we don't judge them for it. You can't expect these children to go to university just because we did. We love them as they are, for what they are. And their progress is just as sweet even if it's not the sort of thing that will win them GCSE grades.

"For their future I just hope that they will be well-adjusted, balanced adults able to fulfil their potential in whichever way they choose."

These days Max can, if he concentrates, speak fairly clearly and his face lights up as he chatters away, telling Christina the plot of Chicken Run.

So, is he glad to be glad of Stuart and Christina's family?

"Oh yes," he says, grinning broadly and hugging his adoptive parents. "Very, very happy."

Used courtesy of the Daily Mail