We turned it in.

June 6th We turned it in. Yes!!!
We spent the next 2 weeks in the rental writing and rewriting our Dear Birth Parent letter, and family collage. These are the 2 tools the prospective birth moms will use to choose their adoptive families. I had thought the home study would be tough but that was really a bunch of hype that scared me. The case workers have been really nice.

We had 2 pages to try and write who our family is and hope that it would help a young woman to feel comfortable placing her child with us… The next challenge was to choose family photos showing the things we wrote about doing in our letter. Again we could fill 2 pages 1 sided. The toughest part of this was Dan unwittingly packed all our digital photos in storage; we only had access to January 2008 to current. So with the use of my 3 inch tripod and taking turns with the camera we got a few more pics to choose from. All in all we had a great time playing in the park while taking pictures.

My friend Ciria was awesome & came up all the way here to put together 2 really cute pages using Photoshop. Thank You!! THANK YOU!! I will use them in family albums but the case worker had some other direction she suggested to us to go. So Dan got really ambitious and bought the program and created a really interesting page…the house one I went with a bit more traditional look. I want to thank our family who were able to give us input on the letters and collages. I am grateful for the internet to help bring us closer which allowed me to get your ideas and even some pictures to help supplement.

Since then we have added some more changes from suggestions from our Caseworker to help refine our letter. I got the good news today that she will be bringing it and our file before the adoption committee on Wednesday June 25th. They will review us, all our information, and make any suggested refinements on our letter...then a week after that we may be finished!!! I long for those words...your approved. Make 20 copies of the letter collage and 5x7 family photos, and wait wait wait.

But we are not really done I also found out today that according to my case worker the agency mostly directs the birthmothers to the itsaboutlove.org web site to look at the online profiles so we need to work on making that. Still I am happy! I believe things will work out, and someday we will be blessed with a sweet baby in our family & Benji will be the big brother he is so anxious to be.