Month: September 2014

That’s right… we are officially “in the pool” of waiting families!

At this point, all we have left to do is wait.

As I’ve mentioned before, the way it works is basically this:

An expectant mother comes into the agency to make an adoption plan. Our social worker (Elly) will then email all of the prospective adoptive parents who fit the situation (based on our answers to the “child you can parent” checklist). She gives us any information that she has on the health of the mother/child, the situation with the birth father, the expected due date, etc. We then decide if we want to be considered for this situation and respond with a yes or a no.

The expectant mother (and father if he is involved) will be shown the letters from each couple that has said they would like to be considered. From those letters, she will usually only pick a few whose profile albums she would like to see. And from those few albums, she will choose the adoptive parents for her child. Occasionally, a mother may decide that she wants to meet two or three of the couples in person before making her decision.

If we are chosen, Elly will call us to set up a time to meet with the expectant mother for the first time at the agency.

The first meeting is usually pretty awkward (so we’ve heard)… with us trying to find a connection with this woman we’ve never met, hoping that she likes us and praying that she doesn’t change her mind, and her trying to picture these strangers as parents for her precious child and probably hoping that we like her, too.

The waiting feels like the hardest part. So much uncertainty. It could be next month, it could be 4 months, it could be a year… we really have no idea.

Our profile is being shown for the very first time tomorrow, to a young woman whose little girl is due mid-October. It’s incredibly unlikely that we would be chosen so soon, but the possibility is exciting! All we can do is wait and pray, knowing it is in God’s hands. If she is meant to be our child, she will be… if not, we will wait for the one who is.

As always, we ask that you continue to pray for us and know that you are in our prayers as well. We truly appreciate having such a wonderful circle of family and friends…it makes this long process a whole lot easier!

And please join us in praying for this expectant mother who has a very difficult decision to make tomorrow… whether she chooses us or not, we hope she finds what she is looking for.

We finally got our profile album and letter finished up! We made our book through Shutterfly (after debating for some time whether we should do a handmade book or a digital one) and it turned out really nice.

It took us about a month to do the album. It was so hard to decide what to say, what pictures to use and how to present the whole thing in a unique way that would make us look like the most awesome, fun, interesting couple in the universe (because we are, right??)… in short, we had to fit everything about us and our lives into a 25 page book. And then we had to take that and cram it into a two page letter. Phew!

But it looks great. We are happy with it, Elly and the girls at the agency are happy with it, and hopefully it will do the trick.

The first thing a birth mother will see is our letter. Out of all the letters she sees, she typically only chooses to look at a few of those families’ albums, so it’s super important that the letter catches her interest.

We tried to make ours stand out by skipping the typical letter format and opting for a more unique look that highlights the most important things about us…

So if she likes what she sees in our letter and wants to learn more about us, she gets to look at our album, which we also tried to make unique and fun. We tried to include a little about every aspect of our lives while focusing on the things that are most important to us. The main goal is to give her a good idea of who we are and how a child would be raised in our home…

The pages are a little hard to read (because I forgot to take real pictures of it before we turned it in to CSS…) but you get the idea.

Enjoy!

We are really happy with how it turned out and hopefully it does a good job of showing who we are.

We turned in our profile (the album and letter) last week and now we are just waiting for the home study papers to be finished and signed (which we will do early next week).

As soon as we have approved and signed the home study, we will be in the pool of waiting families and could be chosen at any time!

Please continue to pray for us and, more importantly, pray for the mothers who will be looking at our profile. As much as we want to be chosen, we cannot even begin to imagine how difficult it is for her to choose. We are so grateful to her for choosing life and for considering us as parents for that precious life she carries so selflessly.