I've been a member of the infertility forum since June and have found it very helpful to have these kind of forums to turn to. I won't go into our infertility story in too many details but just to say my husband and I have been trying to start our own family for either years and are working with specialists to try and be able to have a baby of our own.

A couple of weeks ago we were approached about becoming legal guardians for a family member who is 3 almost 4. We've been working with a lawyer and the biological parents have both signed the consent forms and hopefully in January we'll get everything legal.

The little girl that will be coming to live with us hasn't been socialized much with other children so she doesn't really know how to act appropriately when she is around other children - she tends to hit, etc. She throws a lot of tantrums. So we know she'll be a little hard to handle at first. The reason why I came onto this forum is because this is the first time that we'll have a child in our home full-time. I love being around children - have wanted to be a mother my whole life. This is going to be a life-changing event in our household. I work full-time during the day. My husband works at night at a hospital a couple of days a week. The day before and after my husband works she'll be staying with someone else, but the other days during the week she'll be home with my husband. And then on the weekend I'll be home with her full-time. We feel we can give her a lot of love and the attention that she really needs. And hopefully through these two methods we can help turn things around for her.

Does anyone have any advise on how we should start? We'll need to get her used to being around other kids. We'll need to teach her how to behave and how to communicate better. I'm not sure how she's doing developmentally-wise so we'll have to gauge that and see what help she'll need. We hope to find a preschool that she can go to twice a week. But my husband will probably be having to spend time with her to help her know her 123s and ABCs, etc.

I'm sure I'll have more questions once she comes to live with us but we are just trying to think ahead and prepare ourselves for the change that is going to happen for us. We are really excited about this. We're really hoping that we can make a difference in this little girl's life.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated!