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Originally Posted By JP

We've come through this and survived. Yes, there were many difficult times when we really wondered what we had done to our children. We had three home grown children when we added a special needs child to the family. After the initial excitement the real work begins. There is a lot of work involved in integrating a new family member and making things fit together. There were many rough spots where we all thought we had done a crazy thing. Two years later the dust has settled and all of the things that were major adjustments are past. The adopted child is a sibling to the others and we have no regrets. It did take that long though to really feel great. It took that long to really feel like she was ours to parent. It took that long to really understand what we had taken on medically and financially. We are ready to do it again.

Read everthing you can about adopting older children and foster children. There are a lot of good books out there that helped us keep our perspective though the adjustment time.