The Open Adoption Round Table is a series of prompts to get us writing about open adoption and the way it plays out in our lives. Heather at Production, Not Reproduction hosts it and you can find more about the whole thing, including the entries, here.
This Round Table's prompt is....
The Thanksgiving/Christmas season is BY FAR one of my favorite times of the year, if not my VERY favorite. We are religious people and on those levels everything about Christmas is wonderful. Also, we are close to our families, so it's an enjoyable time of year for those reasons. Plus...who doesn't like eating and gifts? You'd have to be crazy! :)
For Thanksgiving, it's become our tradition not only to get together with our families, but to also host a Thanksgiving meal here for some of Ava's other mom, R's family. I was pretty young when we had the kids (sure, I was in my early 20's, but I was young enough and newly married enough that I wasn't accustomed to, say, cooking a huge meal, turkey included) and with the help of my mom, grandma, and daughter's family, I can now say I can cook a whole Thanksgiving meal AND carve the turkey (something that until this very year, R had always done because I was "afraid" to mess it up! But this year they were running late! lol). We've laughed a lot about how I've learned so much through this tradition and it makes me smile to think that without them in my life, I'd likely still not be cooking a turkey and making a huge meal each year. It makes me happy to prepare it for them and have them enjoy it and I hope in the future it will make our child happy to help in the preparation.
And apart from that, it's ALWAYS fun at the Thanksgiving get-together because we eat eat eat and then...we go and have our family portraits taken!! I'm a bit of a picture freak, so I LOVE adding this to our tradition. I also enjoy being able to get pictures of our daughter and her bio family to put in our home alongside our family pictures. Usually I give the session and whatever pics they want to order to them for Christmas and it always makes me smile to see the Christmas card that R sends out--my daughter's "other" family, her included, because while she is obviously also on OUR Christmas card, there's something right about the way she BELONGS on both cards...in both sets of portraits. And how in one set, the families overlap. Because my bio family is somewhat small and my paternal grandparents have been gone a long while now, it has been a blessing to add in number to MY FAMILY, too.
For Christmas we do something similar, though normally we swap hosting duties! This year R is inviting ALL Of her sisters and their families, along with her dad (her mother is deceased) to her house for a big family Christmas! I am EXTREMELY excited about this because I've only ever met the whole bunch once at a birthday party for R and her dad. I like any opportunity for my daughter to get together with her other cousins and see her aunts and uncles because it doesn't happen often. Hopefully this becomes a yearly thing!
When we have our Christmas get-together, we do a small gift exchange, mostly for the kids, and we also celebrate our sons' birthdays since both they both have December birthdays. I really appreciate that R includes our son so much, in the gift exchanges and on the cake, etc. It cements to me that she feels the same way about us as we feel about her.
And now that I wrote it all out, I'm REALLY looking forward to it all! :D
1 comments:
I love all the ways you celebrate together!
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