Forever Families

I was excited to attend the adoption festivities surrounding the adoption of our friends' little girl from the foster care system. It was in the same courthouse, with the same attorney and case worker as Mikey's adoption. It was interesting to see it from the outside this time.

I feel like an adoption from foster care is very different from an adoption that happens shortly after birth or one that happens in a foreign country. In one way, I felt like Mikey's adoption was so much more of a formality at the point it happened. I felt like Mikey was "ours" long before signing a set of papers. For us, we had been parenting him since he was 20 months old and his adoption was not formalized until he was 4 1/2. I just wanted to get in there, do what we had to do and get out! I did not feel the 'festivity' factor that was so evident at this adoption.

But later, as we hosted his adoption party, and case workers stopped coming by checking if we had clothes in his dresser or food in the fridge, I felt the full impact of the legal renderings. It was like being able to finally exhale. So what I thought was so initially so anticlimactic, turned out to provide the security that had been missing for so long.

The Costello Boyz on Mikey's Adoption Day - June 7, 2007