The Five-Year Familyversary

Well, it's been almost a year since I posted.

It turns out it gets harder to post as your kids get older.  It's not the lack of time (though that doesn't help).  It's the interest in privacy.  If I write about how kiddo X is struggling with ______, will kiddo X read that in 5, 10, or 15 years and be angry that I wrote about it?  (Who am I kidding?  What are the odds that kiddo X will ever care enough to read this blog?)  In any event, it's been harder.

But I'm still here.

And today is our last familyversary.  "Last" in the sense that it's the one that completed our family and turned us from a foursome into a fivesome.  Of course, I'm terrible about tracking these sorts of things.  Marcie's familyversary was just about a month ago, and it completely escaped me.  Between birthdays and "gotcha" days (our familyversaries) and official, legal adoption days, it gets hard to track.  But the timing of today worked well.

Tate's transition to public school has been a little rough.  Last year, in Transitional Kindergarten (TK), we got called more during the school year by the school than we have by both other kids in the past 7 years (12 if you count up Casey and Marcie separately).  This year seemed to be going better.  Until they went from 1/2 day school to full-day school this week.  I mean, we haven't gotten any calls from school yet, so that's good.  But Tate seems pretty unhappy.  Tate has always complained that school is boring -- "too much sitting, not enough playing," he says.  And he gets sent to the "thinking chair" too much, he says.  But now that it's sitting for even more of the day, he is not happy.  And this is only day 3 of full-day kindergarten.  Actually, today was an early-release day, so it wasn't even day 3.

Anyway, when I picked him up from school today, I told him that today is his Familyversary day, and he took to it right away.  "It's my China Day!" he announced.  And he's been repeating it ever since:

  "We can have Chinese food for dinner because it's my China day."
  "We can go out for frozen yogurt for dessert because it's my China day."
  "I can have dessert even though I didn't eat all my dinner because it's my China day, right?"

The kids knows how to work the system.