adoption with a 5 year old Dd already

[trixabell]

Hi there

Does anyone have any experience of adopting when they have a birth child already?

We are in the throws of being evaluated and I wanted to see if anyone had been thru a similar experience and how they found it.

My Dd is 5 and we can't have anyone more children - tired IVF but miscarried and decided to go down the adoption route.

My main concern is how my Dd will adapt - she is quite a mummy's girl!!

Love to hear any experiences good or bad

why not search on the adoption threads? Lots there who have been through this.

HI trixabell. I have a dd1 rising five and have just adopted dd2 who is 10 months.

It's very early days for us, and obviously a big change - and quite a challenging one - for dd1, but she's handling it pretty well and dd2 is completely besotted with her. I think larger age gaps work well when combining adopted and birth children.

Undoubtedly it creates extra stresses in the process - introductions week is really challenging when you add a birth child into the mix.

We adopted DD, now 5.5 when our birth sons were 12 and 8. The relationship with DS1 was always excellent and with DS2 it's been volatile because she rejected him for the first year, then they became friends and now, in the third year that she's been with us he's started to wind her up big time, presumably to pay her back for the difficult time she gave him in the early days. What I would say now is that they all love each other and are very much siblings. They call each other 'my brother', 'my sister' and it feels like they've always been together. It can be done, but be prepared for a roller coaster in the first year or so of the adoption.

thanks for your messages - they were really helpful. My DD is open to the idea of it but I know that reality will be very different.

We were open to a two year gap between my daughter and the adopted child but the more I think about it the more I think a younger child would work better - she could be the big girl and have some responsibility.

Trixabell would love to hear how you get on. We have considered adoption, we are currently awaiting more IVF treatment and don't know yet what we will do if that fails, whether we will stop and just be a family of three (with one DD aged 5 now) or go for adoption.

Wishing you all the very best with how things go.