It's great that you have had first hand lived experience of LAC. I think that would be a real strength in an application.
I would say that health and pain management might be a challenge, especially if your child's needs are unknown. It's not about the everyday nature of having a child, but for example I have two delightful sensory seeking children who slam themselves around, into stuff, jump climb and run like little hurricanes. I wouldn't have necessarily known that element of their personality when I adopted them, and I can imagine that if I was in pain on top of being exhausted and emotional and new-parenty, it might just have tipped me over the edge. Therefore I can see why you might consider an older child whose needs might be more known.
In terms of not knowing family history or trauma, that is the unfortunate aspect of adoption that is the crux of how your family will be made. Your family dynamics will be ultimately rooted in a lack of knowledge and trauma one way or another, and how well you are prepared to deal with that and embrace it will determine how satisfied you can be with that lifestyle. And I say lifestyle, life choice, decisions, but however you call it, you always need to accept that even with the most preparation, the biggest heart, the most love and care in the world, sometimes things don't work out how you expect. Feeling like a minority within a minority is a difficult and lonely position to be in. I know that our children have more challenges than even most adopted families do, for example, and we have ended up in some ways being a subset of an already small minority. We knew it would be hard when we went in, we just didn't know what type of hard.
However, I've said it before on this forum and I'll say it again: you choose your hard. Giving birth is hard, fostering is hard, adopting is hard. I will never have to experience the hormonal changes, physical debilitation or ongoing physical and mental difficulties that some people experience after birth. Nor have I experienced the pain of letting a foster child move on to whatever their next steps are. I chose a different path. I chose sitting in waiting rooms for therapy sessions and EHCPs and sensory equipment all over my bloody house. I didn't know it at the time, so I don't know that it was necessarily an informed choice, but I did indeed choose it, and I'm not sorry I did so.
Being responsible for a traumatised child is incredibly difficult, and not to be taken on lightly, as I'm sure you know. It's so mundane and yet so profound that it can be hard to reconcile. I drive my children to therapy every week, attend countless reviews and panels, sit in the car for 20 minutes after every bloody pick up as he goes wild and hits me, can't do supermarket shopping with the pair of them because they climbed inside the freezer the other day as I was loading up the ice lollies and the Aldi guy had to rescue them... And we took them to Lego land and watched them build space ships, see them grow taller and taller, see them delight that I weep at the end of the bluey episode where she walks towards her mum and then weep a bit more because they try to replicate it with me because it makes me laughcry. It's a very mixed bag, and parenting in a way that I genuinely don't see anybody but other adopters doing. It's a slog, and hard in a way that is so difficult to explain until you have been there. How do I tell people that I don't care if my son calls me stupid because he isn't hitting me or his brother as he does it? And that I'm actually kinda proud that he can use that to tell me he is cross? And that my occasional reply of 'so is your mum... LOL!!!!' is designed mainly for my benefit not his but that it is quite frankly hilarious when he repeats it in another context and makes an inadvertant your mum joke? But also that him calling me stupid really really hurts and prickles me so I have a tendency to over react because my ego can't let it go?
At the moment, for me, adoption feels both the most natural thing in the world, because I can't imagine a life without my boys, but also like a terrifying time bomb. Their needs are so great and so vast that I extrapolate ahead and see a trajectory that is only going downwards, because how can children with such challenges be successful? The cards are stacked against them. The odds were never in their favour. And yet... We make breakthroughs in therapy every once in a while. The other day the eldest randomly ran up to me and asked to kiss my cheek. They seem to have developed an intelligence and fierce loyalty to our family that we did not expect and probably do not deserve given the amount of screentime we allow them and the amount of times I have to shout at them that if they can take their shoes off to throw them at me in the car at 70mph on the motorway, they can bloody well take them off and out them on the shoe rack, even if they go at 0.00000007mph.
Nobody can make the decision for you, but some genuine soul searching is helpful. There are so many reasons not to adopt, and I feel that it is wise to be honest with yourself as to whether you have dealt with each of them so that you can fully commit.
For example, you could ask yourself not necessarily whether you 'could give a child a home' as many people say, because that is twee and trite and shite. However, I think if I were to interview people interested in adopting, I would be asking them the following questions:
Do you found joy in the counter culture, the unexpected and doing things differently?
When have you last gone against expected conventions and why? How does it make you feel?
Do you understand the power of being normal? Do you understand why some children might want this with every fibre of their being? And why some don't?
what is the most extreme behaviour could they tolerate if it were to happen on a daily basis?
Do you understand all the viewpoints about adoption? Have you researched the history of it, the origins, the bias and the nuance?
Are you willing to back down and admit mistakes publically, to someone junior to you? And really mean it?
How wedded are you to traditional family power dynamics? Why?
What are your triggers? Do you get cross if people waste food, make sudden loud noises, lie to you or constantly whine and nag? Could you tolerate someone doing that to you with no breaks? How?
Do you have a support network? What does it look like?
What makes you feel powerful? Why is that?
Would you go to therapy? Do you need to go to therapy?
Can more than one thing be true at the same time? Do you have the capacity to deal with layers of truth and emotions like a little sentiment lasagna?
If you answer these questions honestly, you might begin to shape up some ideas. You can go back through the forums and see what the reality of adoption is like, the good the bad and the ugly, and use them as a springboard for you and your partner to help further discussions.
I hope these musings have been useful in some way. I obviously would recommend adoption for many people, but then I think actually there wouldn't be many people who could genuinely take care of my boys in the way they need. Their FCs certainly couldn't, and so actually I think it only fair for people asking about adoption to get a real flavour of the challenges they could face. If you think you could, then I would recommend starting the process sooner rather than later. You can always pause it once you are in.