The Making of an Adoption Profile Book

As  I was getting ready to write this, I pulled our copy of our adoption profile book out and started thumbing through it. My four year old, Macey, came up to me and said, “What’s this?” and I told her, “It’s a book about Mommy and Daddy before you were born. Jane looked at this book when you were in her tummy.” “Oh. Where’s my picture?” she asked. “You weren’t born yet, Macey, “ I answered. “Oh. Can I have some cheese, please?”

Moment over and gone, for the time being. I color copied our adoption profile book, because after such a labor of love, I couldn’t just let it go. I also wanted it to share with our children at some point. Apparently, four years of age is not the right point.

Rumor has it that sometimes, when people want to become parents, they get, um, busy. When you are adopting to become a parent, you get busy in a very, very, different sort of way.

In domestic adoption, if you are using an agency or an attorney, it’s the expectant mother/ couple who chooses the adoptive parents.  At an informational meeting my husband and I attended, another potential adoptive parent put it very bluntly, “So everyone in this room is competing with each other. We all want to be picked by the same birthmother.” Ouch, not the most politically correct statement, but accurate in a sense. Most agencies have many, many profiles of potential adoptive parents on file, and a handful of expectant mothers who rifle through the books or web pages, looking for a connection. Of course, his opinion was dissected, and the fears of the room, that it really was a competition, were put to rest during the rest of the meeting. It was stressed that as potential adoptive parents , we didn’t want to just be matched, but that we wanted the right match to add to our family. The match that felt right. The match that said, “Yes! This is right!” But, I thought, how would we get to that point without a sensational profile book?

My husband and I were both very excited to create our profile book. We were both editors of our respective high school yearbooks, and figured if we could complete the task of capturing  a year of high school, surely we could portray our marriage in a scrapbook of some sort.

I started by making an outline of what we wanted to portray in our book—the things we talked about in our “dear birthmother letter”. Things like spending time with extended family and going new places. We wanted to put our best foot forward without sounding generic and glossy. We wanted to show our real selves, but our best real selves.

I went to a scrapbook store and spent hours picking out the album and all of the embellishments I wanted to use.  We went through our hard drive of photographs, and some negatives (remember those, before the age of digital) and printed ones we thought would be good representations of our life. We did notice that we tended to take a lot of photos at parties and weddings….where people were holding a lot of beer bottles and wine glasses. I got to work creatively cropping some, so we didn’t look like lushes.

In a few weeks, I had the book done. Our three year marriage and five year relationship wrapped up in about fifteen pages. Fifteen pages that I hoped looked genuine, because it was a labor of love. Fifteen pages that I hoped would represent our lives, and that when an expectant mother wanted to meet us, she’d already have a sense of who we were.

So what did we put in our profile book? Here’s our table of contents:

Page 1: biographical info, photo of us (agency requirement)

Pages 2 & 3: Dear Birthmother letter (agency requirement/agency wording, if I had to do it over, I would not address an expectant mother this way)

Pages 4 & 5: How we met, picture of our wedding, picture of our house

Pages 6 & 7: My extended family

Pages 8 & 9: My husband’s extended family

Pages 10 & 11: Christmas celebrations

Pages 12 & 13: My 30 birthday party (it was a good, recent source of photos of close friends and family)

Pages 14 & 15: Our Travels (we don’t go far, but we have fun)

Page 16: One more photo of us together, and a thank you message for taking the time to look through our profile. In this note, we also expressed our hopefulness/willingness to meet face to face with any expectant mother who wanted to meet us.

Thinking back to that meeting where the attendee put it in terms of competition, I realize how off he really was. It really was all about waiting for the right situation, the right person to see our profile. Because when it happened, it happened fast and fantastically. And when we met the expectant couple in person, they said that we were like our profile book coming to life.

Mission accomplished.

One more thing about your profile book-find out if you will need to make multiple copies. Our agency only required one-it stayed at the agency, or was brought to clients via social worker, and then returned to the agency. Other agencies/attorneys require you to make multiple copies-a check into printing costs is probably a good idea before you finalize how many color pages you choose to have!

Michelle’s adoption profile book was the last scrapbooking project she’s seen through to completion. She counts her blog, Gotchababy as a baby book for both her kids, at least for the time being.