Preparing the rooms

The bedrooms may possibly be the most important part of preparing your home. Your caseworker is going to look at them during the home study and the kids will probably spend a lot of time there until they adjust. It was beyond important to us to make sure these rooms were a place where they could feel safe, loved, and just be able to be kids. It was kind of hard to get a room together for a child I've never met, I didn't know what kind of things they'd be into so we had to keep it pretty basic. We went with pretty neutral themes and filled up a book shelf with some toys and books for various ages. We did however decided since we have three bedrooms to go ahead and make one room a "boy room", a "girl room", and a nursery it made planning a little easier especially with Pinterest having some awesome ideas for bedrooms. Since our caseworker wasn't looking for an over the top room though, we kept it simple, something I suggest doing. You never know how long the kids will be staying with you, but if you're in a case like ours where you're told that the parental rights were terminated give the kids some time to adjust and then you can ask them what they want done in their room. The worst that could happen is that they end up taking some of these things home with them and 9 times out of 10 that's not a bad thing considering what they've been through. Our son is obsessed with Spiderman, it was one of the first things we found out about him even though he had never seen a Spiderman movie or show. He pretty much came to us after a day or two and said he liked the "red spider guy" on my husband's shirt. We went and got him a Spiderman toy and the obsession grew from there so it was easy to know our boy needed a Spiderman room. Our girls however, were more standoffish and didn't want to tell us what they liked so we had to kind of trick them into picking out things. Regardless our three older kids got their bedrooms how they wanted well before our adoption process started to become a reality. Our nursery where our youngest sleeps however was still very gender neutral and will soon becoming a toddler room for her and we're trying to figure out how to do it. Rooms are really important to kids, adopted or not. I highly suggest putting some thought in them and getting your kids input after they're placed with you.