Jul
25
This post is #4 of the Open Adoption Bloggers Roundtable series, started by Heather at her blog. If you’re interested, here are Roundtables 1, 2, and 3.
Our writing prompt for this Roundtable was sharing a small moment made possible by our open-ish adoption. It’s something I’ve written about before, but I’d say this counts.
During School Girl’s 1st grade year, their social studies unit had a “family tree” assignment. When School Girl brought the paper home, the tree turned out to be just that – a 1st grader’s idea of a tree – complete with a gigantic lollipop-shaped top, mercifully minus any branches. The assignment read in part: “Find or draw the people in your family. Place them anywhere on the tree you’d like.” So we did.
As we were frantically hunting for pictures to put on – and we wound up having more pictures of School Girl’s original family than of Evil Dad’s family – School Girl started putting the pictures into groups to put on the tree.
“There’s your side of the family, Mommy, and Daddy’s side of the family, and my side of the family.” There it was. All arranged into neat little groups at the beginning, but by the time they were actually glued onto the tree they were all mixed together. The way they are for her right now. Everybody that she loves all mixed up together. Every side of our family.
That’s a cute story. I dread the family tree project and my daughter has had one every year…
Every year? *shudder*
I admit, we lucked out with a pretty sensitive teacher. She’s involved in adoption herself; her mother was an adoptee back in the day when every adoption (including kinship, in some cases) was a closed adoption. She also made the decision that kids could decide whether or not to share their family trees with their reading group (instead of the entire class). Which was nice, as there were several other kids who had, shall we say, challenges with family tree assignments. We got incredibly lucky. I don’t expect that that’ll happen every year.
I am already thinking how we can do that one for Ava….”mercifully without branches” would be right! Makes it so much less complicated!
Cute, how they all ended up together!
I’ll see if I can find a copy of her instructions for you – I thought it was really good.