The whole point of celebrating a familyversary is that it's the day your family was made. Or updated. For most families, this day is the day their child is born. For many adoptive families, though, we don't meet our children for days or months or even years. So our family isn't born, per se, until the day we meet our children.
Casey joined our family the day he was born. Though, I suppose technically, legally, he didn't join it for three days. We just celebrate his birthday. (* I should note here that some people consider Family Day or Gotcha Day as the day they finalized their adoptions. In our case, our adoptions weren't finalized/ re-finalized in California until months after we actually "got" our kids.)
Marcie, on the other hand, joined our family on August 21, 2006, a full nine months after she entered the world. So yesterday was the anniversary of our family. I imagine when we add our B.S. #3, our Familyversary date will change to the date he or she becomes part of our family. But we probably still won't celebrate it. Don't get me wrong-- Marcie is an amazing addition to our family. We just weren't complete without her. But we celebrate family all the time. And we celebrate Marcie (and Casey) all the time, too. At least I'd like to think we do.
I don't have a problem with other people celebrating their Familyversaries. It's a nice thing to acknowledge. But I don't want to emphasize it, either. The way I see it, Marcie was always meant for us, even before she was born. And we were always meant for her. It just took us a while to find each other. I guess that's not a great reason not to celebrate the day; after all, we still celebrate our wedding day, even though in theory we celebrate our marriage all the time. So I don't have a good explanation for why we don't make a big deal of our Familyversary. We just don't. I think if it becomes important to Marcie as she gets older, we'll take her lead. In the meantime, our Familyversary is just like every other day. Just with a special name. And we did create a cool name for the day, don't you think?
In any case, we did happen to go out last night. It was coincidental that it was our Familyversary. We went to Red Robin (I think Casey was going through withdrawal). I took lots of photos that show how much Marcie has grown in the year she's been with us. But here's my favorite:
I also took a photo of Marcie in the outfit she was wearing when we first met her. Check her out:
THEN:
AND NOW . . . (sorry about the blurriness of the first photo)
And to all you families out there who have familyversaries to celebrate, HAPPY FAMILYVERSARY!
1 comment:
Congratulations!
We haven't reached the first anniversary of the day that we were united with Nathan. We call it our Together Day. I'm not sure what we will do to "celebrate". I already have planned to send pictures to the orphanage and to make some sort of donation to LWB orphanage fund. We are going to use it as a day to remember and be thankful for the people who raised Nathan the first 15 months of his life and to remember all the children still in orphanages without families.
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