After the mountains of paperwork, the background checks, the home study, and the creation of the infamous birthmother letter, we are finally approved. We are ready to wait. It is actually somewhat terrifying to think that we have been working diligently on this process since July at the Weekend Intensive workshop. There has always been one more piece of information to put together and get approved. Now, there isn't. We are done. We have spent countless hours ensuring that we are the perfect home for someone, but that person hasn't shown up quite yet.
We have statistics to check how frequently the online version of our Dear Birth Mother Letter is being accessed and for how long. I check that daily. Or twice a day. Or really, it is always open in the background and I am constantly clicking refresh to see if someone is looking at our site. Its the little thing I can do so have some semblance of control over the situation.
We have been "live" for almost a month. I know the average time for matching is about 14 months, and I know that we are only one month into that wait, but that doesn't mean I can't hope we will break records and find a match this soon. It is crazy, I know, and it will probably drive me somewhat nutty, but I have a wee touch of the OCD and I am a checker by trade, so this is just perfect for me to spend my time doing.
As I said, it has been a month. Our 1-800 number is all set up and forwarded to the home phone. Our email is set up and is ready to go. And it has been relatively quiet. Yes, we have had some hits. Some people have been looking at our site. Some have even gone back more than once. In fact, someone in Arkansas (eek!) has looked at our site 5 times. She spends a fair amount of time reviewing our site and her returns come several days apart. It is exciting. But i don't know if it will evolve into anything. We have had one call to the phone number, and it was a dead end.
So we wait. It will happen when it is supposed to happen. I know that. But honestly, those words don't provide me any comfort when I want something to happen right now. I have to keep it in perspective and Chad has been incredibly helpful in keeping things from getting too crazy. When I want to already consider more options for birth mother situations, he reminds me it hasn't been long enough to be thinking we are being too picky. It will happen when it is supposed to happen. And we wait.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Dear Birthmother, We Want Your Baby
So one important aspect of finding a baby is finding a nice girl who has gotten herself into a predicament that she is not ready for. I am sure whoever we find is going to be someone who is wonderful and special. She has simply made some difficult decisions and she is mature enough to realize she isn't ready to have a child of her own to raise, so she wants to find a good home. But this woman doesn't just show up on our doorstep. I mean, it would be really nice if that's the way it went down, but I don't think this method would really be something I would sell my house on.
IAC has a very innovative plan for helping women find adoptive homes for their babies. Its the Dear Birthmother Letter (DBML). This is a marketing tool that we create to show ourselves off as the best family for her. It is a mixture of pictures and text that tell our story in an attempt to "sell ourselves". A completed DBML is printed and given to the IAC so that when women call, we can be included in a packet of letters that get to sent to her, assuming our preferences match her situation and vice versa.
We went to work almost immediately back in August to create this letter. We enlisted our dear friend Hilary to help us take some stunning photos of our gleaming smiles for the cover of the brochure and she also supplied some children for us to use, since we don't have any of our own - obviously - and want to show the prospective women that we actually like children and can play nicely with them. We had a rough draft of our letter already in place because I am a planner so I knew this was going to be expected. However, I did not realize HOW rough the draft was. I fancy myself a bit of a writer, so I figured much of what I had said in our draft was good and effective. I used good images to draw the woman in and hopefully make her feel like she had found the family for her. Then the edits came in.
On staff at IAC is a marketer and editor. His main job is to review everything we have to say and then tell us that everything we have to say about ourselves is not good enough. This process is incredibly frustrating. We submit a draft, wait a week for his responses and edits, pick our egos up off the floor when we realize that in our current state we aren't exactly the best of the best, make the changes and the cycle continues. We have to talk about ourselves, our home, our careers, our interests and how desperately we want a baby. BUT we can't come across as too desperate or needy at the same time.
Every week between August and October, we played this little game. Then when we had the letter done, we played the game with our pictures. We scoured high and low for pictures that showed we liked to have fun. We certainly didn't want the women to know that we like to hide in dark rooms alone listening to depressing music (no, I swear that has never happened). Our pictures couldn't be just us, posed. They needed to be candid and action oriented. Now, many of you may know that neither Chad or I actually enjoys pictures or posing for pictures, so this task was frustrating. We had to keep in mind that everything we were asked to do by the editor was for the better good. I am not going to lie when I tell you that I was stressed about this. It put into compromise my pride as a writer. I had to finally realize that I had never actually written something like this and needed to accept the fact that I wasn't perfect - even if my mom tells me I am.
Finally, in mid October, we got the final approval and were ready to print the letters and begin the long wait. In the end, we created a letter we are proud of and truly believe will demonstrate our personalities and our hopes for a future with our child. It is professional, yet warm. It is perfect - and my mom hasn't even seen the final product, so I am going to say that it must be true!
IAC has a very innovative plan for helping women find adoptive homes for their babies. Its the Dear Birthmother Letter (DBML). This is a marketing tool that we create to show ourselves off as the best family for her. It is a mixture of pictures and text that tell our story in an attempt to "sell ourselves". A completed DBML is printed and given to the IAC so that when women call, we can be included in a packet of letters that get to sent to her, assuming our preferences match her situation and vice versa.
We went to work almost immediately back in August to create this letter. We enlisted our dear friend Hilary to help us take some stunning photos of our gleaming smiles for the cover of the brochure and she also supplied some children for us to use, since we don't have any of our own - obviously - and want to show the prospective women that we actually like children and can play nicely with them. We had a rough draft of our letter already in place because I am a planner so I knew this was going to be expected. However, I did not realize HOW rough the draft was. I fancy myself a bit of a writer, so I figured much of what I had said in our draft was good and effective. I used good images to draw the woman in and hopefully make her feel like she had found the family for her. Then the edits came in.
On staff at IAC is a marketer and editor. His main job is to review everything we have to say and then tell us that everything we have to say about ourselves is not good enough. This process is incredibly frustrating. We submit a draft, wait a week for his responses and edits, pick our egos up off the floor when we realize that in our current state we aren't exactly the best of the best, make the changes and the cycle continues. We have to talk about ourselves, our home, our careers, our interests and how desperately we want a baby. BUT we can't come across as too desperate or needy at the same time.
Every week between August and October, we played this little game. Then when we had the letter done, we played the game with our pictures. We scoured high and low for pictures that showed we liked to have fun. We certainly didn't want the women to know that we like to hide in dark rooms alone listening to depressing music (no, I swear that has never happened). Our pictures couldn't be just us, posed. They needed to be candid and action oriented. Now, many of you may know that neither Chad or I actually enjoys pictures or posing for pictures, so this task was frustrating. We had to keep in mind that everything we were asked to do by the editor was for the better good. I am not going to lie when I tell you that I was stressed about this. It put into compromise my pride as a writer. I had to finally realize that I had never actually written something like this and needed to accept the fact that I wasn't perfect - even if my mom tells me I am.
Finally, in mid October, we got the final approval and were ready to print the letters and begin the long wait. In the end, we created a letter we are proud of and truly believe will demonstrate our personalities and our hopes for a future with our child. It is professional, yet warm. It is perfect - and my mom hasn't even seen the final product, so I am going to say that it must be true!
Nesting, Part Duex
It has been a long time since I updated you all with our comings and goings. While it has been silent on this blogosphere, trust me when I say, it has been anything but quiet here at the homestead. Call it preparation for the noisy screams of the baby echoing throughout the house, but we call it just more settling in for the baby's arrival - whenever that may be. So we have been trying to make the baby a little more, how do you say, appealing. We have been doing a lot of work on the cosmetics of the house since we moved in. Exhausting work, I must say. Again, probably preparing us for the exhaustion we will feel with many sleepless nights with the baby. But we have redone the kitchen and painted walls in nearly every room and prepared the nursery. Despite what appears to be the perfectly completed house, there was still the dreaded floors. The carpet in our house has been absolutely horrendous. It was the original carpet from when the house was built about 20 years ago. Yeah, you can imagine. It was hideous. It was a light grey color that had so many stains it was beginning to look like some sort of a war zone, or worse yet, a murder scene. How could we ever let our child crawl around on that kind of a floor. While science cannot prove this, I would venture to guess that there was a few bed bugs or hornets growing inside of the carpet fibers. It had to go.
Before we could actually recarpet the house, we needed to do something with the mid 90s hardwood floors that had clearly passed their prime. Rather than spending a ton of money paying someone else to screw us over, but get a decent product, we decided it would be a great DIY project. Probably lunacy, yes. I have never involved myself in a lot of manual labor type activities, so this was going to be very interesting. We rented a lovely drum sander and edger to start the project. Despite my profound lack of knowledge of anything construction related, I figured I could get everything done in just a short day. Yeah probably not. I worked ridiculously hard and it just didn't happen. I was covered in sweat, covered in fine dust, and probably inhaling some sort of product "known to the state of California to cause cancer". It was great. Or it wasn't at all. But after 4 days of hard core working, it is done. Check that off the list. A week later, the carpet went in and it is like we have a new home. Perfect for the baby.
It is crazy how some anxiety surrounding bringing a baby into the home can cause you to change it up completely. We want this home to be perfect for the baby and in the mean time, it is really nice to have a house that is becoming more of our own home. I am sure that the first thing the baby is going to do when he/she comes home is judge us on the padding underneath the carpet, so we sprang for the upgraded stuff. I am fairly certain we will get some thank yous from the little one...
Before we could actually recarpet the house, we needed to do something with the mid 90s hardwood floors that had clearly passed their prime. Rather than spending a ton of money paying someone else to screw us over, but get a decent product, we decided it would be a great DIY project. Probably lunacy, yes. I have never involved myself in a lot of manual labor type activities, so this was going to be very interesting. We rented a lovely drum sander and edger to start the project. Despite my profound lack of knowledge of anything construction related, I figured I could get everything done in just a short day. Yeah probably not. I worked ridiculously hard and it just didn't happen. I was covered in sweat, covered in fine dust, and probably inhaling some sort of product "known to the state of California to cause cancer". It was great. Or it wasn't at all. But after 4 days of hard core working, it is done. Check that off the list. A week later, the carpet went in and it is like we have a new home. Perfect for the baby.
It is crazy how some anxiety surrounding bringing a baby into the home can cause you to change it up completely. We want this home to be perfect for the baby and in the mean time, it is really nice to have a house that is becoming more of our own home. I am sure that the first thing the baby is going to do when he/she comes home is judge us on the padding underneath the carpet, so we sprang for the upgraded stuff. I am fairly certain we will get some thank yous from the little one...
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