Adoption Day

Today our family celebrates Adoption Day, the anniversary of the finalization of our son Leo's adoption. Here in California, the adoption process takes six months, so for the first six months of his life we were his foster parents.

We went to family court on this day six years ago to finalize his adoption. The family court judge was a family friend of David's family, so he enjoyed having us there. From what his assistant said, adoptions are the only nice or fun part of family court, that all of the other cases are sad or upsetting. We had Leo's grandparents, great grandparents, great aunt and "godparents" (for lack of a better word for non-religious people who are designated to raise him if both David and me die). It was a somewhat sad day for his "godparents" - the day before their adoption plans with a pregnant young woman had fallen apart. But later that month another young woman chose them to raise her child, and their son will be six later this month.

So tonight to celebrate Adoption Day the three of us plus David's parents will go out to eat at Leo's favorite restaurant. Our gift to Leo will be a necklace like the one that I received for our San Francisco anniversary last month. His has "heart symbol" in the smallest disk, "Daddy" in the middle disk, and "Papa" in the largest disk. It was what he asked for, but he doesn't know that we bought it for him.

I think about his birthmother today. I hope that she's doing well, but the last we heard she was losing custody of the set of twins that she gave birth to two years after Leo was born. Child Protective Services was in the process of removing them from her custody for neglect.