Today is our anniversary of waiting 3 months to be chosen by a birthmother. I haven't had too much contact with our agency. I've mostly just been waiting for the call, but I did get a concerning email from the agency about a week and a half ago. I had emailed them to check to see how everything was going and they responded by saying that several birthmothers had viewed our portfolio, but none had expressed interest in us at this point. However, they were concerned about our China adoption because they thought it may be upsetting to the birthmothers to know that we were also had another adoption pending. The strange thing is that we had put our China adoption on hold and had told out domestic agency that. Even if we hadn't put our Chinese adoption on hold, we still would have a 4 year wait period to be placed with a child and our domestic agency knew that, too. Anyway, I didn't think too much about it. I just figured that they had forgotten about the hold, which is ok, everyone gets busy. However, the more I think about it, I'm becoming concerned that when they introduced our portfolio to the birthmothers, they mentioned the Chinese adoption because there's no other way the birthmothers would know. As we are not pursuing the Chinese adoption, it's not in our portfolio. So I called the agency today to talk to them about this and clear everything up, but our case worker is out until Friday so I'll have to wait for that call back.
The wait has been ok. On the bad days I just keep reminding myself how short our waiting period has been. It had only been 1 month, then 2 months, and now we're at 3 months. But mostly I don't think about it too much and I don't get down about it very often. It's actually been a pretty content and happy time for me because I finally have a sure thing to look forward to. I've had a few friends tell me that they are trying to get pregnant, are pregnant, or are about to have babies recently. Before, this news would have killed me. It was so painful and while I was very happy for my friends, I would drown in self-pity at every announcement. But now, I feel like I know that I'll have a baby in the next 9 months, too, so it's exciting to receive news from friends because I know that I'll have friends with kids around the same age.
Anyway, we are ready. We are so ready that I feel like we're leading a life that has a big "insert baby here" sign stamped on it.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Update on the Nursery
This is a quick post of pictures of the nursery now that we have it complete. Insert baby here:
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Our Portfolio
If you're caught up with the other posts, then you know that the last step to our domestic adoption process was to submit a family portfolio for potential birthparent(s). I spent about a month piecing our portfolio together. Our agency had given us two other sample portfolios from other families and a few tips, such as:
1.) Make sure that there is no evidence of alcohol anywhere in any picture. This is a big no-no with birthparent(s).
2.) Don't include pictures of me and Michael with our nieces and nephews. It's a bonus to birthparent(s) that we don't currently have children and if they are preliminarily flipping through, looking at the pictures instead of reading, we may get dismissed because they'll think that our nieces and nephews are our other children.
3.) Be sure to include traveling and hobbies.
4.) If there are other adoptions in our family, write about it so the birthparent(s) will know that our family is already experienced with, and accepting of, adoption.
Number 1 was easy. There aren't a lot of pictures of Michael and I that include alcohol anyway. Number 2 was understandable. I did include tons of pics of all of our nieces and nephews, but was careful that they did not contain me and Michael, too. Number 3 was fun - we love traveling and have great hobbies. And I came up with a way to fix number 4. We have one adoptee in our family, and I tried to get his permission to mention it in our portfolio, but he didn't get back to me by submission time. So, since the importance of another adoptee to the birthparent(s) is that it assures them that our family is and will be supportive of this adoption, I figured that we could still portray this through letters from family and close friends to the baby. I sent out an email to all of our loved ones and the response was overwhelming. We received more loving letters to the baby than I ever thought we would get. It ended up taking up 7 pages of the portfolio. It meant so much to me that we had everyone's support and love. I still get teary-eyed when I read them.
Without further ado, here's our portfolio:
(Editor's Note: We tried to embed electronic signatures into our personal letters to the birthparents, but it never looked right. We decided to just actually sign each copy after they were printed. The version here does not have signatures, but Michael's is the first and mine is the second - if you couldn't already tell from the content.)
1.) Make sure that there is no evidence of alcohol anywhere in any picture. This is a big no-no with birthparent(s).
2.) Don't include pictures of me and Michael with our nieces and nephews. It's a bonus to birthparent(s) that we don't currently have children and if they are preliminarily flipping through, looking at the pictures instead of reading, we may get dismissed because they'll think that our nieces and nephews are our other children.
3.) Be sure to include traveling and hobbies.
4.) If there are other adoptions in our family, write about it so the birthparent(s) will know that our family is already experienced with, and accepting of, adoption.
Number 1 was easy. There aren't a lot of pictures of Michael and I that include alcohol anyway. Number 2 was understandable. I did include tons of pics of all of our nieces and nephews, but was careful that they did not contain me and Michael, too. Number 3 was fun - we love traveling and have great hobbies. And I came up with a way to fix number 4. We have one adoptee in our family, and I tried to get his permission to mention it in our portfolio, but he didn't get back to me by submission time. So, since the importance of another adoptee to the birthparent(s) is that it assures them that our family is and will be supportive of this adoption, I figured that we could still portray this through letters from family and close friends to the baby. I sent out an email to all of our loved ones and the response was overwhelming. We received more loving letters to the baby than I ever thought we would get. It ended up taking up 7 pages of the portfolio. It meant so much to me that we had everyone's support and love. I still get teary-eyed when I read them.
Without further ado, here's our portfolio:
(Editor's Note: We tried to embed electronic signatures into our personal letters to the birthparents, but it never looked right. We decided to just actually sign each copy after they were printed. The version here does not have signatures, but Michael's is the first and mine is the second - if you couldn't already tell from the content.)
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