My name is Theresa and I live in Arizona with my husband of 16 years. We have 25 children (and 2 more “ex-foster children” that we still consider ours). 20 of our children live at home. Three are in residential treatment centers. Two are grown. Of our children, three are biological children (ages 15,13, 9). The rest of our children are adopted or ours through legal guardianship. Most of our adopted children were older at adoption, many came as part of their sibling group, and well over half are older children/teens from disrupted adoption situations because of severe behaviors, mental illness, emotional disorders, RAD. Many of our children adopted from disruption were originally adopted internationally. However, my husband and I have never been to another country to adopt; we've adopted all of our children here in the United States, both from private adoption situations and from foster care (where we are very proud to have also sent 20+ children back home to birth parents during our, thus far, 8 years and counting as foster parents).

Children's ages at adoption: 17,17,14,14,14,13,13,13,12,9,9,8,8,8,7,6,5,3,3,2,1

Children's ages currently: 25,23,17,16,16,16,15,15,15,14,14,14,13,13,12,11,11,11,10,9,9,9,6,4,3

My experience includes my own adoptions and raising my family of older adopted children. I've also worked to license other families for foster and adoption. I've taught classes on adoption, adopting the difficult child, raising children with RAD, finding resources BEFORE you burn out, and several other topics. I also ran two support groups for our agency. I have owned and managed (and helped, I hope) an email group for "disrupted adoptions" with a large member/mail volume.

My passions lie with adoption issues including adopting the difficult older child, working with kids/families who deal with RAD, helping families who get to a point of considering disruption to find resources, keeping siblings together whenever possible, and promoting the keeping of birth family ties where able. While I wish for a home for every child, you will not find me promoting only the rosy side. I hope to balance all of the realities of adoptive parenting in a way that best supports all families. I love to write and my own family/personal blog can be seen here: largefamilymomma.blogspot.com. I can be reached at adoptiveparenting@adoptionmail.com.