Most of my loyal readers know that my wife and I began taking foster care and adoption classes a month after we got married. I've shared how we both knew we were eventually going to adopt and we figured we should go ahead and get the process started, thinking we could come back to it later after we had biological children. During classes we were shocked to realize that the foster care system prefers potential adoptive parents who aren't planning on having, or for some reason cannot have, biological children. The general idea is that the adopted child will naturally take a back seat once the parents have "their own" children. My wife and I were shocked! To us an adopted child would be every bit as much our child as a biological one would be. (In fact, during my wife's pregnancy I often worried I would love my adopted child more than my biological children) We were saddened to realize how often adoption was seen as a backup plan for couples. Adoption was never a backup plan for us. It was always just as much of a plan A as having biological children. Always. There are several reasons [...]