Adopting out of birth order is a hot topic in the adoption community. Should it be done or not? You will find advocates for either side of the coin. Like most situations in life, I believe that it depends on the family involved. We have adopted out of birth order a couple of times. It has worked out well for our family for the most part.

Our first three adoptions were of babies. We adopted our daughter, Sahara first. When she was almost three years old, we started our son, Ryland’s adoption. When Ryland was five years old, we adopted our daughter, Claire. We stayed in birth order and life was fine and normal. Then we decided to adopt from Ethiopia. Ryland was feeling the need for a little brother. We wanted a son close in age to Ryland. We knew that meant that any child we adopted would be older than Claire, but since she was only two month old at the time, we didn’t feel like that would pose a problem. She would still be the baby and wouldn’t remember life any other way than having several older siblings. We chose to adopt two boys from Ethiopia. It felt perfect for our family. We intended to keep Claire as the youngest and not adopt a child older than Ryland. Sahara was adamant about remaining the eldest child.

We asked our agency to refer us two boys between the ages of one and four. They sent us a video of some of their waiting children. It seemed like all of the kids we were interested in were already referred to other families, except for a sibling group of a seven year old girl and her three year old brother. We felt drawn to these two children, even though the seven year old girl did not fit into our initial criteria. Bethlehem was older than Ryland. By adopting her, we would be adopting out of birth order. Ryland was fine with it, when we addressed the issue with him, because he was still the oldest boy. He was used to having an older sister, and felt that having one more was not that big of a deal. We accepted the referral for Bethlehem and Kenyon. We decided to add another little boy to our paperwork and be finished building our family in one fell swoop. We told our agency we’d like a referral for a toddler boy. At the time there weren’t any on waiting child list, and we were asked if we would accept the referral for a baby boy. We agreed, and found out about our son, Ezra, who happens to be two months younger than Claire.

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