Adopting 2nd time round

[Jannt86]

We adopted our 2.5YO almost 2 years ago. She's an utter delight and we definitely want more. My question is just what happens 2nd time round? Do you go through the entire application process again or are there 'shortcuts?' Also we would obviously want to adopt biological siblings if any came along but how on earth do we ensure this? What happens if our LO's bps have another 5 minutes after we are placed with another child? I've always been of the mindframe that I'd do everything I could do adopt any biological sibs but at the same time we can't just sit and wait for something which might never happen. Thanks x

We are just doing this now, our 2 have been with us for a similar timeframe. We are not doing any training days as we had before, we have weekly Zoom calls with a sw to update our PAR. Had to redo background checks, medical,references & update our initial questionnaires (family and friends eco map etc to update to now). The timeframe appears to be shorter (4months), but will have panel again. We expect matching to take longer as we are no longer 2!

Also we would obviously want to adopt biological siblings if any came along but how on earth do we ensure this?

You can’t is the simple answer is you can’t, it’s entirely possible your child’s birth mum might keep any subsequent children age has - it’s not a given they would be eligible for adoption, a lot can change in 2 years.

Make no mistake I would absolutely want any subsequent children to stay with BP if at all possible. What I meant was that if a biological sib went into the care system we would want to adopt them and I'm not going to lie I'd be disappointed if for example we adopted a none-biological sibling and then that somehow prevented us from adopting a bio sibling if that makes sense. I guess like you say though we would have to take that chance if we adopted again xx

It does make sense, you could talk to social work about it so they knew you would be interested if the situation arose but then you’d need to decide how long to wait before adopting a non-bio sibling. You’d also need to think about how many bio-siblings you’d want to adopt. Birth mum might have several other children and at some point you’d need to decide how many was too many because those bio-siblings could end up in the system anyway.

Currently going through the process to adopt again a biological sibling. We’ve finished all our meetings (we had about five) and we did one training day, but not sure that was compulsory but it was very good (and I hated the original prep training so I was skeptical, but can highly recommend it!) Now waiting for care proceedings to conclude, does seem to be taking ages but I guess it’s just the way it is!

Our adopted child already had a sibling adopted by someone else, and they did approach both of us but they didn’t want to proceed. We were told had we both wanted to proceed it would have become a competition in a way. I think you wouldn’t be overlooked and they would have to offer future children to you kind of first, before moving on. I wouldn’t count on birth parents having more children though...

To be honest we didn’t think our child’s birth parents would have any more. It was a shame we didn’t know before hand as we would have done foster to adopt or something similar.