How does Nia feel about sharing her much anticipated adoption day? If she's cool with that, great, but what if she wants her own day in the calendar?
That is the biggest concern I have and one that I'm going to talk with her about a lot. I had already told the caseworkers I wasn't wiling to have the baby adopted first even if her case went faster because it didn't seem fair to Nia. But so far, Nia is excited about the idea of sharing, and we have months and months to make sure that stays accurate before going forward with it.
As for this: Unfortunately, I don't remember to do that sort of thing in practice, may I recommend the boring yet (to me) thrilling scheme of putting a reminder in next year's calendar the appropriate amount ahead for various schemes you'd like to try? I finally remembered to do that for various holiday preparations this year, doing it when last holiday was wrapping up and what I wished I'd done earlier was fresh in my mind. I also had the academic calendar for the following year already in there, so I could look at when classes ended and everything to figure out when I would have time to do this and that, and it worked fantastically well.
And Mara did not have an adoption party, though we did have a little blessing service for her, so all of this is new. Nia's plans are going to have to be scaled back a bit because I suspect Justin Bieber won't make it and also that she won't have learned to play the piano well enough to perform a song as planned. (She's not taking lessons or anything; this is just what she imagines.)
Hilariously, one of the two songs they want is "Never Gonna Give You Up" and making rickrolling our family tradition might be a good start.
Maybe it would be a good day to make sure you've got good photos of them, together and individually. I think one portrait and one head to toe shot, maybe in their room or with their most prized possession so you'll be able to see how it changed. My parents were really good about taking lots of photos, and it's really cool to go back through them. If you're crafty, you could do a scrapbook and have each girl decorate "their" page each year. They could also write (or dictate) their favorite thing about each family member, including moms.
4: Doesn't Halford know somebody that knows somebody that know's Bieber's publicist? This could be just the thing to fix his image!
Hooray and congratulations!
Yes, this.
7: It's not done YET, and it'll be another six months or so before we get there. There are both obvious and non-obvious things that could still jinx it. I'm just thinking ahead because it's my plan to create a family with these three girls and they are worth celebrating.
Sorry. No more calling attention to jinxing entities.
Some clothing ideas for the holiday:
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Oh, portraits are a great idea.
Also I forgot: we interview the kids as well. Get some cute quotes for posterity.
I think you really have to stoke the anticipation for it to feel like a holiday.
I don't think whether it feels like a holiday is going to matter that much to the kids (kids generically, anyway). The fact that there's a warm and fun family tradition is what's going to matter to them now and in their memories.
We used to go camping every summer with various of my dad's fraternity brothers and their families (my honorary uncles, aunts, and cousins). Even though it stopped being a regular thing when I was pretty young (and literally* all of the couples other than my parents got divorced), I still think of them all as family.
*Literally.
one portrait and one head to toe shot
Yes!
Since I'm filling up the sidebar...
My sister celebrates adoption day with her daughter fairly quietly, but A. was adopted as an infant and doesn't have any memories of her birth family. With 3 of them, and with their having come from foster care, though, I think a big to-do sounds great.
The actual adoption day is bittersweet in a lot of ways, and I will be in court for the termination (or outside if a parent, judge or lawyer doesn't want me there) and that's emotionally brutal even when it's the right thing to do.
Our next-door neighbor is going to do portraits of them sometime soon, but it would be great if we could do the same pose at the same time every year or something like that. Another friend had wanted to throw me a baby shower and I said no because I thought it wouldn't be fair to Nia, but the next suggestion was a celebration of all three girls, so people are on board for that.
We celebrate Arrival Day for each of the kids - the day that each of them came to the U.S. as an infant. (Unusually for many foreign adoptions, we weren't allowed to go to Korea to pick them up). We have cake and give them a present and look at ancient videos of them coming off the plane - it gets pretty dusty in the bill house when we watch those. Each is now in her/his twenties and we've never missed an Arrival Day. When the kids were little we threw Arrival Day parties too - which unintentionally helped their friends figure out why each of them looks different from us. Recommended.
Oh yes - we finalized their legal adoptions months after they arrived - had to go through home visits by our social worker and a routine court proceeding. We don't celebrate "end of necessary but uninspiring legal process day."
Fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly.
17: Oh, there's also no reason to believe it won't! It would be tons more work for the state to move them at this point and no one wants to do that unless we fuck up spectacularly. But it's foster care, so nothing's final until it's final.
We do celebrate the days they came to our home, but often that means talking about how scary and sad their various moves have been for the big girls. I'm not sure how much the baby will remember or what she'll think about it, but we try to keep the more ambiguous celebrations private. I know for some kids adoption is like that, but a family day might help.
