national adoption day
My employer practices something called (unofficially, I'm fairly sure) Mandatory Volunteerism. What this means in practical terms is that each and every branch and department must find a community event to volunteer at each year. You won't get paid, you won't be promoting the company, and it can't cost the company anything for you to participate, you just have to give your time and wear a company t-shirt while doing it. The idea is to promote a feeling that we as a business are part of the community we reside within.
This year, our branch chose the local Adoption Day Celebration - partially because Miniboss is a former foster parent and she and her husband adopted a nine-year-old foster child four years ago, so she has a lot of ties to the system. It was an eye-opening experience.
What the county system here does is to save up a number of adoptions at this time of the year and perform them all on National Adoption Day along with a street fair to celebrate the most recent adoptees and those that have been adopted in the past. We ran the crafts booth, helping the kids decorate picture frames to put their picture of their new family in.
I think those of us that have been lucky enough to grow up in intact nuclear families can not really understand what it is like for these children to be adopted. For that set of adults to come along and say "yes, I want to make you part of my family forever" to a child who has been in foster care or in state care for any period of time.
That was driven home to me this morning by the announcement that one of the adoptees today was a seventeen-year-old boy. Now, I think anyone can guess that this kid had given up hope of ever being adopted, he is almost a legal adult after all! But today, a set of people looked at him and told him that he would always have a home and a family, some place to go for Christmas, and someone to call whenever he needed advice or help or just a sympathetic ear. Forever.
That is possibly the greatest gift you can give another person and I admire every parent out there, biological or adoptive, that is raising or has raised a child. You are all heroes.
This year, our branch chose the local Adoption Day Celebration - partially because Miniboss is a former foster parent and she and her husband adopted a nine-year-old foster child four years ago, so she has a lot of ties to the system. It was an eye-opening experience.
What the county system here does is to save up a number of adoptions at this time of the year and perform them all on National Adoption Day along with a street fair to celebrate the most recent adoptees and those that have been adopted in the past. We ran the crafts booth, helping the kids decorate picture frames to put their picture of their new family in.
I think those of us that have been lucky enough to grow up in intact nuclear families can not really understand what it is like for these children to be adopted. For that set of adults to come along and say "yes, I want to make you part of my family forever" to a child who has been in foster care or in state care for any period of time.
That was driven home to me this morning by the announcement that one of the adoptees today was a seventeen-year-old boy. Now, I think anyone can guess that this kid had given up hope of ever being adopted, he is almost a legal adult after all! But today, a set of people looked at him and told him that he would always have a home and a family, some place to go for Christmas, and someone to call whenever he needed advice or help or just a sympathetic ear. Forever.
That is possibly the greatest gift you can give another person and I admire every parent out there, biological or adoptive, that is raising or has raised a child. You are all heroes.