Flash Forward to Present Day

I think that should catch us up to our present day situation. There are a lot of details I could go into,  but I honestly think it would just be overkill and probably nobody else is as interested as I am in them. Please feel free to ask about anything you are curious about. I would love to talk about it!

So where are we now? Drowning in paperwork. Almost literally.

The biggest step is to get our profile completed. That is the color magazine with pictures and texts. It is the single most important piece since that is how the birthmother decides who she wants to pick. Basically we were told that she usually gets the pile of possiblilities down by 2/3rs based off the cover picture alone, then cuts it in half again by the inside photos and then finally reads the words when it is down to like 4 or so. Yikes! We better have nice smiles! Ours is going to be 12 pages including the front and back covers. I have been working on it non stop for a week now. It is REALLY hard to write 12 pages about yourself/spouse. Geesh!

The agency suggested that we use a graphic designer who they have had good results from in the past. We are using a woman based out of Madison who was adopted herself and has adopted her son, so she knows how important this is. You can check out her website at:

www.ourchosenchild.com

There are several examples of other people's successful profiles under (you guessed it) the heading profiles and prices. This will give you an idea of what it will look like in the end. A big thanks needs to go out to our family who has scrounged up and emailed us a ton of pictures to use. We were lacking in family photos.

I think I have it just about completed. I emailed it to my dad who thought it read well but was a little too...outdoorsy although not in a hippy kinda way but more of an environmentalist kinda way. Neither of which we are, but we just happen to mostly do outdoors type things. I made a few changes tonight and sent it on over to our case worker. She will review it and make her own suggestions and comments about how it reads. I also resent it to my dad to get his thoughts on the revision. My guess is that she is going to say it is too long. I really poured my all into it so I hope it goes well.

After she sends me back her ideas and I decide to make changes or not and send it back again until it is per our liking, I will send it off to the designer along with our pictures. She said it should take about a week to ten days for her to get us a proof. Once it is all accepted, it goes off to the printer. Now the scary part - once printed we start to be presented to birthmothers!!!! This means we could be presented to someone in about 2 - 3 weeks!!!!!!!! Which means we could be chosen in about 2-3 weeks!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course, I am not getting my hopes up or excited or anything. I know the average is 6-12 months, but.........

Ok, deep breath....

Oh! One thing I didn't mention which is actually pretty important. Apparently you need to live in the same place for 6 months (in the state of Wisconsin, other states can vary on the time) after placement. Since we are planning to move in June 2013, this means for us that we have to have a child in our loving arms by the end of January 2013 or perhaps February if we stay an extra month past graduation. If we are not chosen in time, we will have to place our account on hold until after we move and get a few things updated which would probably be about 8 months maybe 7. lets hope we don't have to do that :)

Kind of off topic:

I was introduced to something new to me through this process (ok, well it is all new to me but this is nonspecific to adoption new) called Dropbox. Apparently it is, well I guess I don't really know what it is, but it seems like an online network that you have a password for. She set up folders for all our pictures with different titles such as "our home" "sara's family" "pictures of dusty" "us with kids" etc... to help organize and make sure we hit the important categories. I also think I put my text in there too somewhere. Apparently she can have instant access as soon as I put something in it wihout me having to email everything. Anyone else ever use this before? It seems pretty nifty.