large families/ adoption ?

I traveled to China in Jan to bring home our 2nd daughter and 6th child. The CCAA, china adoption folks, rules are "No more than 4 minor children in the home" we had 5. But they will look at families on a case by csae basis for their waiting children's program. One of the big factors is exceeding their minimum financial requirements, which we did thanks to dh AF retirement and current job. I too am a stay at home mom, so that helps and our oldest son was 16, and would be ready to be "launched" soon. I think it depends on the agency/sw you're with and how willing they are to advocate for you. The agency we adopted our first daughter thru would not consider us for China, especially an out of birth order adoption. Our 2 youngest are younger than the daughrer we just adopted. The agency we ended up using, didn't exactly advocate for us, infact I'd never recommend them to my worst enemy, but they did have our daughters file so there we were and here we are almost a yr later. I know of families who have 6 and 7 minor children in the home who are adopting thru CHina. Our first daughter was from Korea and we were told that to get a large family waiver we would have to accept a child with significant special needs, but we needed to be realistic about what we could and could not handle with 5 other children in the home, so we didn't pursue that avenue. There are countries, Ethiopia is one, that do not have a a requirement on the number of children in the home. SOme days I would like "Just one more, and then there are the days when I come to my senses and say "What, are you nuts???" Goodluck, Shelley