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The stickers follow everything he should do during the day, like washing and teeth cleaning and eating his meals. We told Jamie that if he stayed in bed at night, then he would get a bedtime sticker and then a smiley star to say he had done everything that day! It took Jamie about a week to get his first bedtime sticker for staying in bed and a smiley star - to see his face when he came down in the morning and saw it would have reduced even the hardest person to tears - he was so excited. He was jumping up and down in the kitchen shouting "I've got a smiley star!!" over and over again!

We reward the stars with treats like a video or a magazine, but now they're getting more frequent, we've given him a long term reward that now if he gets a week worth of stars we're going to buy him a goldfish. To his credit he nearly did it this week, but just got up once a couple of nights ago, so he's nearly there!!

Of course, he still pushes the limits and I've found that if I tell him not to do something and then leave the room - he blooming well does it! The other day I put a flea treatment on our cat behind her neck and told him that I'd given the cat medicine and he mustn't touch her. I then went out of sight, but I could see him via the magic of mirrors! The cat was under the table, and suddenly so was Jamie. At first, he got a car and moved it quite close to her. Then he looked around to see if anyone was looking and then slowly reached out his hand to nearly touch her. He jumped a mile when I said "Jamie!". That's kids for you - tell them not to do something and it's like a challenge!

Jamie is also at nursery now twice a week for full mornings - he loves it! The first few weeks he just didn't want me to leave him, and was crying his eyes out, but a quick call to the nursery when I got home confirmed that about a minute after me leaving, he was laughing and playing with the other children.

Of course, when I picked him up at lunchtime he would run over to me hugging me and shouting "Mummy, mummy" - one of those tear-jerking moments I'm afraid! Now he just doesn't even look back when I drop him off, and just waves over his shoulder - it's so comical! I still get the "Mummy mummy" when I pick him up though which is lovely!

His attention span has improved no end and amazingly he can now write his name too which he loves doing because of the praise he gets! I bought some flash cards too (he calls them flashing cards!) and he loves me to get those out and play games with them. His counting has improved no end and he can now recognise most of the numbers between 1 and 9. We are so proud of him.

We have now filed the papers at the Court for the adoption to become legal, so that as soon as the 13 weeks are up, we can get things sorted as quickly as possible. Both our social worker and his social worker are thrilled with the way things are going.

We now have a book full of photographs from the foster carers and beautiful messages from all his friends he had when he was there - it breaks your heart to read them! We're meeting up with the foster carers at a neutral venue soon, with his social worker, so it will be interesting to see how he copes with that!

He still mentions them but has now got them well and truly in context, which is great for us. They are now fostering a new little boy, so we will gradually tell him about that before he meets them again so he gets more of a grip of what they did for him. He's such an intelligent little boy - he takes everything in, which can be dangerous sometimes when you're in the car and someone cuts you up!!

We're still waiting for Jamie's life story book, so we think that he thinks he just lived with his foster carers before he came to us. He has never said anything about before that time, so we're not sure if he recalls any of that at all - its difficult to know really. I think as soon as we get the life story book then we may start to gently introduce that to him at an appropriate time.

All in all things are going really well and we're both settling into the fact that we're parents. It has taken some time for us to adjust and "relax" into it, but now its starting to almost become second nature and we are really beginning to enjoy it rather than fret about it too much. Of course, that's this week - being new adoptive parents, you never really know what will happen next!!