The Album

First

I have to say, to all of those who find the time to write everyday...How do you do it???

I have found a new respect for all those who find the time to blog on a daily basis...it is hard! I am sneaking around trying not to be seen by the kids, because you all know they will want the computer to do whatever they deem important. :)

Here we go.

The last post was about the homestudy/dossier that is needed to be done to be considered for adopting a child. Today it is the "Album" that you make when you are adopting domestically. I know some people never had to do this, or did it just with pics or a video. With our agency we had to write a letter to prospective birthparents and make an album of our life up to the point in which we wanted to adopt. A quick and simple assignment.

The letter

When you write a letter to prospective birthparent you are trying to communicate in one to one and a half pages who you are. What you believe in, what you do, how you grew up, what type of child you were interested in adopting, why you were adopting all the time trying to make it sound casual and normal. Easy right? NO, not easy. We wrote our first letter thinking we knew what she wanted to hear, what she wanted to know about us. This letter, frankly sucked. It sounded like we were these too normal, too perfect, too much couple! When we showed it to our social worker, and she laughed! She had spent quite a bit of time with us and wanted to know who we had "ghost write" our letter...I kid you not. That is how nervous we were, we thought we knew just what a birthparent wanted to hear. We had no clue. We came to find out all we had to do was write in our own voice...and it sounded like the "normal" us. And it felt right. We weren't trying to be perfect, hell we are all flawed, we were trying to show that we were ready and open and trustworthy. Writing with our hearts and less of our heads made this process easier. Looking back on that first letter, well we just have to laugh!

The Album

So now comes the album. A collection of photos of you and your spouse, your family, the activities you enjoy doing, how you spend your time. Easy enough, right? Wrong! We went over photos again and again. We had traveled to China and all over South East Asia, we had been to California and Hawaii. The question comes up, "are you planning on taking a child to these places? Do you have the means to do so?...If the answer to any of these questions is, "no", those photos are out! Then we ran into the problem of not having any photos of the two of us, unless we were drinking at a party or acting like idiots (note photo at top :)), and we all know the answer to that! Photos out.

We spent the next few weeks having friends take staged shots of us around our house, out to dinner (hiding the drinks :)). And finally we came up with something that we were proud of. Something that said, "us".

These two parts took a couple of weeks to do. We didn't want it to just be thrown together, we wanted to let it grow and see how it went. The longer we sat with our letter and album the more confident we became...we weren't that bad! We were just two people looking to have a child to add to our family. The more we worked on the album and letter, the more we could visualize a child in our home...a baby to take pictures of, a birthfamily that we would share memories and photos with. And it felt right. It was us.