After completing page 2 of my daughter's life book, it was pretty easy to decide the theme of page 3:  the description of her placement day, when her birthmother ("B") signed her relinquishment papers, and Alex came home to us for good. 

Looking through my photo archives, I found many pictures of placement day -- and it was really hard to go through them.  It's really interesting:  you would think that this day would've been one of the happiest days of our life -- and, I suppose, on one hand, it was - however, with an open adoption, the feelings of placement day can be very complex.
We met Alex's birthmother about 2 months before Alex was born.  As a result, I developed a friendship with B -- I began to get to know her as a person, know her family, learn what she hoped for herself.  She therefore became someone I cared about, irrespective of the unusual circumstances under which we met.  I really liked her.  I really like her.

So when placement day came around, my happiness at bringing Alex home was clouded by sympathetic grief:  it was difficult to be witness to the sorrow that I knew my friend B was experiencing, especially when Marcus and I were involved, in some part, in her pain.  We were all crying -- and I was thanking her for giving us a beautiful daughter, and she was thanking us for taking care of her daughter.  It was a strange, wonderful, sad day.

Nonetheless, I managed to pull together some photographs of us smiling -- even one where B and Marcus were making faces at the camera, over Alex's sleeping body.  There's another picture of B and I, and B is clearly smiling through her tears.  Finally, there's a shot of all four of us.  I added the words "Thanks," "smile" and "cry," to the page, because I think those three words capture the feeling of that evening:  gratitude and grief, in a very complex way.  And, thankfully, I had written this post in my personal blog the very evening we got home, so I was able to use it to handwrite my thoughts for inclusion in this life book.

As far as the rest of the book, it's going to be very difficult to come up with the themes for other pages, now that the story of how she came to be a part of her family is more or less complete.  I know that I'll probably do the book through at least the first 18 months of Alex's life (perhaps more).  One page will probably be devoted to when Alex met my family, and one will be devoted to our trip to England when she was 15 months old, when she met Marcus' family.  There'll be a page devoted to the day we went to court to make our family official, of course.  And there'll definitely be one for our first family vacation, when we went to Santa Fe, and hiked through Native American ruins, Alex strapped securely to Marcus' back.

But other than that, the rest of the pages will be devoted to the sort of stuff that any parent would put in their child's scrapbook, I suppose -- milestones, that sort of thing.

Any thematic ideas for future pages?

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