Our son's adjustment to the adoption of our daughters has been very impressive. My husband and I used a lot of strategies and discussion and processing to prepare him for the experience. We included our son in the initial decision to adopt and in every other step along the way. He was a very important part of the entire process and his input was highly valued. He put in a vote for adopting a boy, but I vetoed that request. I really, I mean reeaalllly, wanted a girl. All things considered, I think he's done quite well.

One of the biggest adjustments that I recall being very difficult for him was the initial shock and a sense of invasion of privacy that he experienced when the girls were permanently placed with us. Before then they had been visiting between their foster mother's home and ours. It was like a really neat play date. Once they came to live with us permanently my son experienced a lot of frustration and anger because the girls kept bothering his stuff. We worked all of that out after only a few months.

Once when we were talking about how everything was going I told my son how pleased I was with the way he was handling it all. I assumed that his relatively easy adjustment was due to the fact that he had been able to identify something about the new family constellation that allowed him to maintain a special role. Perhaps it was the fact that we had preserved his birth order as the oldest child, or that he was the only boy in the family. I asked him about that and he corrected me telling me that neither of those things was really a big deal to him.

I asked him if he still felt special since we had grown as a family his face lit up and he said "Oh yeah!" I was eager to find out what it was that he identified that made him appreciate his unique place in our lives. He told me, "I'm the one that came from your tummy!"

At first I felt a little uncomfortable about his pronouncement. It smacked of a feeling of favoritism that I didn't think I should be encouraging. I can't quite remember what I said, but I know that I had the presence of mind not to respond negatively.

So how did I respond? Tune in tomorrow...