In hashing over the various challenges of the first 3 months home with the girls, I've come up with a few things that I wish I'd handled a little differently. I'm not really beating myself up over it-- I think we've done a bunch of things right too. But I thought that writing about them might help other families who are preparing to bring home older children.

1.) I allowed rude 'telegraph-style' requests at the start. (For example: "Mom, salt!") I should have told them the very first time they demanded something that 'please' is required. "Please salt" really is almost as easy, and much more kindly received by mom. As it was, I waited a good two months before I began requiring 'please'. That is totally opposite to the way we've trained our other kids. They could have easily learned to say it much sooner. I'm grateful that they'd already been taught to say 'thank you' and did so regularly. On tiring days, simple courtesy makes it so much easier to be charitable towards children. I really should have given all of us the benefit of that training much sooner.

2.) I bought them too many things at first. With older kids it is hard to do a lot of shopping until you get them home and discover their sizes and tastes in clothing. One week I'd discover that they didn't have enough socks. Another week I'd realized they only had two Sunday dresses that fit. Still another week I'd realize that they needed swimsuits or blankets or some other essential thing. Though I tend to be a frugal person who yard-sales tons and accepts hand-me-downs happily, I ended up bringing something new home from Walmart for the girls almost every week. And they began expecting it. I started to see a discontent with their clothing choices, and an increase in their casual demands that I buy them more shirts. If I had it to do again, I would buy fewer new things and do it with less fanfare-- maybe stick items in the back of their closet for them to discover later -- in hopes of seeing less of the 'gimmie' monster.

3.) I laughed about misbehavior that actually bothers me. I was so anxious at first to be loving towards them that sometimes I laughed off stuff that we don't allow our other kids to do. For example, the girls would sometimes get in angry little slap-fights over small things. At first I was hesitant to jump into the middle of their relationship since overall it was a successful one, and obviously they'd gotten this far in life without me supervising their tiffs. But I realize now it wasn't really honest of me to laugh over something that truly disturbed me. It would have been much better to gently insist that the hitting stop and to explain that hitting sisters and brothers is not allowed in our family.

Many of our missteps in the beginning were related to my hesitation to clarify the rules of our family to the girls. Without fail, every issue we ignored at the beginning had to be dealt with later on anyway, when John and I were more worn out and when the girls were tired of being agreeable. I really think that glossing over early misbehavior caused us much more hassle in the long run than it would have if I'd simply explained the rule up front.

Those are the major things I can think of now. Anyone else have similar things they did wrong at first? If you're brave enough, please share it here to enlighten us all!

Photo credit