A Bittersweet Lap

I've had my eye trained toward Saturday, July 18 for a while now. That is the day when Little Bug would have lived with us for as long as he lived with his foster family in Korea. For some reason that milestone meant a lot to me. It somehow validated his position in our family and this culture.

I had grand plans to post on our family blog about it (I love to post about anniversaries of any kind), but as it got closer, I started to feel unsure about how much I should herald this milestone. It's great, don't get me wrong, but my obsession with this milestone wasn't really for him. Little Bug remembers nothing of his time with his family in Korea, nor does he probably remember his time with us last month. To celebrate "lapping" his time in Korea would be purely for my selfish benefit....somehow validating not his place in our family but my place in his life. And yikes, that seems a bit desperate to me.

The honest truth is that those first 10 months of his life will always have a huge impact on who he is. As much as I love him and am proud of the way he joined our family, I don't want to celebrate anything that highlights his loss of a birth family, birth culture, and loving foster family. Bittersweet is a word I often used when we were in Korea to bring him home, and I think it applies here, too.

So I let it go. I didn't think about it, I didn't blog about it, I didn't even mention it to Appa. In the end, it was just a meaningless date in July. What was important about that date was the fun we had as a family, the love we felt, and the memories we made...and there is nothing but sweetness about that.