Six adoptions and 10 children into the adventures of parenthood, my husband and I know first hand the downside of sibling adoption. After four single-child international adoptions, my husband and I had two beautiful, bright girls from South Korea and two handsome, wonderful boys from the Philippines. Our girls were grown and off on their own and our boys were entering high school and this Mom was not ready to face an empty nest. Having bucked tradition from the time we got married at the ages of 17 and 20, we decided to once again enter the process of adoption.

In the past five years we have adopted two sets of siblings. The first sibling adoption took more than a year, but we were eventually matched with a group of three children, a boy aged 6, a girl aged five and a girl aged two. Seeing a photo of the three of them sitting in a row with their arms around each other, it was easy to fall in love with the dream of them in our family. It was only after the adoption that their caseworker gave us the photos that were not used in the listing. These were the photos where the kids were hitting each other, one was trying to pull the other two into line and one was screaming her lungs out.

The second sibling adoption took place in 2006; three boys ranging in age from 9 to 12, which gave us six children between the ages of 7 and 14.

It is hard to know which problems relate to the fact that the kids were older when we got them and which relate to being adopted as part of a group. Imagine going to a local daycare and taking home a child that you had never met before and one who had no idea who you were, did not understand why you were taking them home and did not know if they were going to stay with you or go back to the home they knew. What would you expect that child's behavior to be? Now, imagine you went to the same daycare and took home three children of different ages at the same time.

In many ways, adoption is the same. Of course, you are given background information on the children and you know their basic history. You are excited to meet them and believe that if you love them enough you can, by your own super parenting powers, wipe out all their fears, their mistrust, their belief systems and make them part of your family. You may even operate under the belief that they will be grateful to you for taking them away from their life in foster care.

Reality is that the children's entire life history is boiled down into a relatively

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