Family Day

Dan and I had several discussions about what we should call June 19th. Should it be "Gotcha Day", "Family Day", "Adoption Day", etc. We even went so far as to poll the internet and find out what other people called their adoption day. A little background...

In Vietnam, what makes your adoption official is a ceremony called the "Giving and Receiving". I have no idea why it's called that, but it is what it is. When I'm on the various Yahoo groups centered around Vietnam adoptions, I also talk about the g&r. I honestly have no idea what other countries call it, but as the years of international adoption have gone by, the term "Gotcha Day" has been coined to refer to the day a family adopted, or "got", their baby. Generally speaking, I hear that term in the China communities.

We decided that for our family, we didn't want to use the phrase "Gotcha Day". Although it has no negative connotations for us when we say it, or even when we hear it, it does leave a bad taste in the mouths of many in the adoption community. For some, the phrase can be construed as you "got" your child and ran away, never to return. Or, maybe that you "got" them from the depths of poverty. Or, you "got" them in your grasp. (I guess I should really research how the prhase was coined, because I really have no idea.)

Anyway, I did a poll on several of the groups I frequent. I had a little bit of feedback to my question, which was what we should call June 19th. "Family Day", "Adoption Day", "Gotcha Day" were the most frequent replies. I had wanted something a little more personal than those phrases and I really liked the one my friend Shana and her family use, which is "Familyversary", the anniversary of when they became a family. Very cute. I had a couple of other suggestions, but for the life of me I couldn't remember them...

But in the end, we decided to call it "Family Day", because it's the day that our family of two merged with the boys' family of two, and became one complete family.