Through lively prose and creative illustrations, Foster, the mother of two sons she and her husband adopted after toddlerhood, offers lessons and strategies to other adopting parents on confronting challenges and making the best of the adopted child-parent relationship. She combines anecdotes and guidelines her family personally developed with discussion of grief, brain development, behavior issues, and concerns common in adoption scenarios. She offers ideas for rules and solutions for food issues, progress charts for school, introduction of "rituals" to create consistency, early sex lessons, considerations for contact with birth parents, games that encourage bonding and trust, describing and dealing with family history, managing emotions and behavioral difficulties (including through "dumping sessions"), determining consequences for problem behavior, and managing second child syndrome, among other issues. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)