[organicmommy]

Well I know that some of us are just getting started and some of us are farther into the adoption process. But I thought that I would lay out a few things that should be thought about. I did get some of these from another group I belong to, so thank you Joanne for the ideas!!

1.) Depending upon the age of the child(ren) you are adopting or hoping to adopt, how will you handle situations that arise at school? Are you wanting to send your child(ren) to public, private or homeschool them and why?

2.) If you already have children of your own, are you going to try to stay within birth order? Why or Why not?

3.) What thoughts have you given to any special needs situations you can handle? How many siblings are you able to adopt? What if your sw calls you with a situation that has "one" more child than what you specified? How do you respond to this situation?

These are just a few of the things I have been thinking about lately.
Here are my answers.
1.) We are hoping to adopt children under the age of 7. My preference is to homeschool as I am already a stay at home daycare provider and would like to keep my children home at least until they start middle or high school. At that point it is their decision to make. We have 2 school districts that we can choose from to send our children to. They both have pros and cons. One is small and has a better student/teacher ratio. But they are a small school so resources are not as good at this school. The other is a large school so there is less one on one time with the students but the resources are soooo much better.

2.) At this point we have no children of our own. So birthorder does not play a point for us. If we were to adopt more than one group of children then I think I would try to stay in birth order, but if it was not possible, then we would have to sit down and discuss it at that time. Sometimes it is not always a bad thing to bring in a big brother/sister. I know I always wished I had a big brother to stand up for me when I was in school. I was the oldest of the family tho so that was not an option.

3.) We have a set of what we feel we can handle as a couple. We are open to a lot of special needs but have said that we don't feel we can handle a child that has a short life expectancy or a child that has severe mental problems. As far as the case of the worker calling with "one" more than we had said, this just happened last week. We had stated we wanted a sibling group of 2 children. She called with a group of 3. They had no special needs and did we want to submit our homestudy. Well we talked about it and thought long and hard about it. In the end we decided to submit our study for them. We did not get chosen but it did make us think that maybe a group of 3 would not be all bad. So we are going to change our study to say we are open to groups of 3. However they will be on a case by case basis. I am hope all day alone and we want to make sure that with the daycare I can handle the special need requirements with the other children that are here as well.

Well I hope that we can get a discussion going with this and get some input from the everyone on this.