This guest blog is from the sixteen-year-old son of JulieC, who was adopted as an older child through a stepparent adoption after being abandoned by his birthmother.   After suffering much emotional trauma in his short life, he has grown into an extraordinary, and outstanding young man, who although suffers from a touch of the teenage lazies, never ceases to make his parents proud in all of his many accomplishments.

I tried to write a poem about my relationship with my mom,

No, I am not talking about the actual stepparent adoption process, but the life of the family after the adoption of a stepchild.  All over the Internet, one will find support groups for adoptive parents, blogs for adoptive parents, and forums for adoptive parents. Yet adoptive stepparents, although being involved in the most common form of adoption in the United States, are seemingly nowhere to be found.

Most often, when adoptive stepparents are seeking support, it is before the actual adoption.  They are seeking information as to how to go about performing a stepparent adoption, yet once the adoption is complete, rarely do those

After a family decides to go through with a stepparent adoption, one of the first questions that they will ask, either themselves or others, is “where can I get the forms to complete a stepparent adoption

When people think of a surrogate mother, they think of a woman who carries a baby for another couple, not so much of adoption, yet did you know that surrogacy and adoption go hand in hand?

After I wrote my last two posts, "The Brady Bunch" on Step-Parent Adoption and Adoptive Parents: Are You Treated Like the "Real" Parent?, I watched another episode of The Brady Bunch that tied the two posts together. I figured that this meant that I was destined to write about it – either that or that my brain really has turned to mush from watching too many Brady Bunch episodes, just as hub said it would.

This episode was the one in which Mike wins the "Father of the Year" contest. Marcia spends the whole episode writing an essay on why Mike should be the father of the year and keeps getting into trouble for breaking the house rules and not revealing why. Mike is obviously shocked to find out the real reason for Marcia's disobedience. They read part of the essay, in which Marcia wrote, "Even though he has only been my father for a short time, no one could be a 'realer' father."

Okay, I admit it: I am a Brady Bunch fan. Watching The Brady Bunch was a happy memory from my childhood, and those of you who have followed my blogs for a while know that those memories are few and far between. Hub is not real crazy about his wife watching The Brady Bunch, but I am not real crazy about him scaring the dog while he yells at the television during Carolina games, so I guess that makes us even.

I have not seen an episode of The Brady Bunch in years, so I thought it would be fun to watch the series on Netflix. It has been really neat to see the episodes in order because I have always seen whatever happened to be aired at the moment in syndication. (I was only a toddler when the series launched.)

This weekend, I watched the episode where Bobby (who was maybe seven years old) wants to run away from home.

Those words were spoken by my adopted stepson this afternoon while I was pulling into a 7-11 to get the boys an after school snack.  His best friend was in the car, and somehow they had gotten on the topic of his adoption.  Apparently the other boy hadn't realized that I had legally adopted my son, and was under the impression that I was still only a stepparent to him.