As a follow up to my last post, our formal application has been approved!!! Yay!!! We now move on to the next phase of approval in which they meet with us as a couple and individually to discuss our life and find out more about our family. They also do a homestudy to make sure that our home is safe for children. Considering that we already have a child, I would certainly hope we will pass that! So, it looks like one hurdle has been passed and we can begin worrying about the next one. Now on to the topic of the post.
If you had to tell the story of your family with pictures, what photos would you use? Would you have enough pictures to tell the whole story? For our adoption, we need to do just this. We need to tell the story of our family in a photo book. This book will then be shared with birth parents who are making an adoption plan for their child. Birth parents will be shown the photo books of all families who match their preferences. The birth parents also have to match the preferences selected by the prospective adoptive families. After reading the Dear Birth Parent letters and looking over the photo books, the birth parents make a decision about which family would be best for their child. Obviously, this photo book is a pretty important project to a prospective parent like me. The fact that I need to start gathering pictures together for this book enters my mind regularly. Have I started doing it yet? No. Every time I think about starting to look for pictures I stop because I have this fear that I am not going to find “the right” pictures. I think about fun times that we have had together that I would love to include in our book. Then I remember, we were having too much fun to take pictures! I would think about the camera later and say to myself, “Aw, we didn’t take any pictures…oh, well.” I never realized how helpful those non-existent pictures might have been in the future! I also know that as I start looking through the pictures I will run into a problem with any pictures taken after our daughter was born. Pictures of my husband and I together, just as a couple, suddenly disappear. Our pictures are either of our daughter or of one of us with our daughter. So, I am sending a plea out to friends and family, if you have any pictures of Nick and I together please e-mail them to me! I will also gladly take any good pictures of all three of us or even individual pictures. The more pictures I have to choose from, the better the book will be.
Even though I am a little worried about starting this project, I am excited about it as well. Not only will this photo book help us adopt a child, but it will also be a really nice book for us to keep. I might even think about making a photo book about the story of our family if we weren’t adopting, just to have.
In addition to the photo book we will also submit a Dear Birth Parent letter. In this letter, three pictures are included. The letter will be uploaded online so that Birth Parents can look at it just by going to the agency’s website before even coming in. It was suggested that one of our pictures be a video montage of pictures set to music. The woman from the agency said to make sure that the song we pick is current and that it would appeal to people in their teens and twenties. I wanted a song that was upbeat so I am thinking of using “Brighter Than the Sun” by Colbie Caillet or “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson. The Colbie Caillet song has started to be played on the radio so often that I am not sure I should use it, but I am not sure how well known the other song is. I am hoping that at 34 I am not that far out of touch with “current” music that would be enjoyed by people in their teens and twenties, but if I am, please tell me! Any input on my choices would be appreciated and feel free to offer different song options!
No comments:
Post a Comment