birth family

Birthdays are for celebrating!

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Happy-Birthday-Cake2

 

Summer is a lot of things, break from school, vacationing with family, summer camp and fun with friends!  Summer for our family is also birthday time for our girls with one born in July and the other in August.

Birthdays are a BIG deal for us.  BIG in that we celebrate for all its worth (and by the way not just for our girls but our birthdays too)!

Our youngest will be turning six this month, how did that happen?  She is excited for all her birthday entails including an overnight visit from the birthday fairy who leaves balloons in her room while she’s sleeping and at the kitchen table.  Of course she’s excited for the gifts, the party and the time honoring her, but she is also very excited that it means we will spend time with her birth family.

In fact both her birth mother and her sister’s birth mother will be celebrating our girls birthday for a weekend together!  We are all looking forward to next weekend when all of us will be together to celebrate and to bask in the girls and our family!  Everyone is in countdown mode for the airport pick up on Thursday morning and then imminent arrival of the rest of our family on Saturday.

This is not the only time we are ALL together but it is a special time going back to when each of our girls were born and we were invited to be at the hospital.  That was the time that our family really came together with all of us joining together as one unit.

So it is these birthdays we celebrate with all our heart and soul and our girls are the benefactors of all of us coming together!

and so with all that we know Birthday are for celebrating!

8 years

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birthday cake 7-19-14

It’s hard to believe our eldest daughter turns 8 years old today.  How is it possible she’s already reached this milestone?

We remind ourselves on this day that you are the light in our lives, you bring us joy and happiness, you do keep us on our toes and you are a wonder to watch as we see you growing into the strong, smart, beautiful young lady you are today!

It is not lost on us that our dreams came true on this day because of others and the decisions they made in choosing us to be parents. Everyday we realize how blessed we are to have our daughter. Each and every year we see our blessings grow watching her grow from a newborn. Now at eight, our conversations about her adoption story and our family have grown and her understanding of our family has deepened. We see you seeing us as part of your whole each piece of your family making you into one!

Happy Birthday to our beautiful princess! May your year ahead be as happy as your first 8 have been!

We love you to the Moon and back a Gazillion Times!! xxoo

She sees us as part of her whole …

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manipulative-fraction-circle-whole-outline

During this school year our second grader had a project related to social studies that included finding out your families ancestry.  She had worked on this project speaking with both her birth mother’s family and her birth father.  We learned from both sides she shared similar ancestry like being Scottish, Norwegian, Belgium and more.

Recently she and I were discussing what to have for dinner and the conversation turned into what you may eat if you are Chinese, Chinese food; Mexican, Mexican food; Irish, Irish food; etc.  I then explained that that may be true when living in your home country but you don’t have to be that ethnicity to eat that type of food.

Her response was well I eat Italian food and I’m Italian.  I looked at her thinking how I can respond to her as technically she is not Italian but I am.  I asked her if she remembered her school project from earlier this year and what we had learned about her ancestry.  She told me yes she remembered but that SHE IS Italian because I am.

I sit here today thinking about this conversation and being glad that our daughter knows where she comes from from the relationships we have with her birth families. It tells me she is not split on who her family is. She is confident in that she belongs to ALL of our families and we are all a part of her wholeness.

Mother’s Day for me is bittersweet …

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I want to wish all the REAL Moms I know a Happy Mother’s Day, each of you inspire me and to each of our girls’ birth moms I want to send my love to you for making my dreams come true and am so happy to share this day with you and our love for our daughters! ♥

Merriam-Webster definition

Bittersweet adj

1. :being at once bitter and sweet; especially : pleasant but including or marked by elements of suffering or regret

We began our journey to parenthood through adoption in 2005, and by some miracle we became parents in 2006 and again in 2008! It was a challenging experience to get from those days to today. The whole time while I wondered, when would it hit me that we were picked, that this baby was born, that we took her home, that we adopted her and were parents? Guess that day decided to show up… Bigger than Christmas and more meaningful than my birthday… and it happened twice! but I realize as my dreams came true there was another who made the choices and sacrificies to fulfill my dream and it was not something they had originally dreamed for themselves.

So it is on this day, Mother’s Day, that I have very mixed feelings … our girls have relationships with two mothers, the one who loved and cared for them for nine months and the one who loves and is raising them…and together we share the love of our daughters everyday!

I realized how blessed we all are, to first be a family and to call our girls’ birth families our family. I am thankful everyday that C and then S chose me to be the mother of their daughters.

Yes this is a pleasant day to be remembered as my daughters’ mother, but I know there are others who feel elements of suffering or unhappiness that they are not with their children everyday …

And here we are a family which means being there for each other during the fun and happy times, and the sad and unhappy so for that I wish all the REAL mothers I know a good day and hope they are feeling good about themselves!