[MilehighDad]

After hearing all the advice and then going through two, I personally think an adoptive placement should be handled differently than a foster placement. I think our girls needed to know that we were "claiming" them hard and fast from the very beginning. On the other hand, they were only somewhat prepared to do the same for us. With our teenager, we asked her the first day if we could introduce her as our daughter and she said yes. For our preteen, we simply told her from Day 1 that we considered her to be our daughter and we would introduce her that way.

For how they addressed us, we told both of them that they could either use our firstnames or Mom and Dad. Our oldest never once called us anything but Mom and Dad, and our 11-year old took about a week to switch over. In that week, we only had a few hours with her face-to-face and then talked to her on the phone every night.

Hope this helps, both girls need to hear that we love them, that we are never going to give up on them, and that it is permanent over and over. You can read their ages in my signature, but they're both still struggling to truly accept those things.