Making your profile

iheartbri

Hi Everyone,

I've been a lurker (Which should really be 'stalker') of this board for a month or so now.  Your stories make me smile and cry and know that as we walk this adoption road..we won't be doing it alone!  No long intro here, just two young (married for a year) people who can't wait to become parents!  We're doing Domestic Infant and are on a waiting list with one agency and starting our home study on Tuesday so that we can use a referral service as well.

 Now comes the part where I need your help:  We need to start our profile and Dear Birthmother letter.  I'm an ok writer and my husbands pretty good at graphic design, but I'm feeling completely  overwhelmed.  Knowing that this is the ONE connection you have to make a first impression to a BM I want it to be perfect.  So my theory is: pay OurChosenChild.com to make it for us.  Let her turn our questionaire into 'adoption friendly' wording and help us see what we should highlight about ourselves. My husband says, Save the money, we can do this. 

What have you guys done?  I know it's a little different when you are working with an agency that helps you do it...but we aren't going that route, so...I'd appreciate anyone's input.  Or if any of you have used a professional to make your profile..I'd love to look into some other options if we do go that route.

amm78

You can do this!

We are going to pay a graphic designer to put everything together for us and make it look pretty, but we wrote our text.  I think it will come across as more genuine if you write it yourself.  We are working with an agency, so they told us what sections they want us to have and then they edited what we wrote and sent them.  The sections we have are:  About Us, About Me (written by my husband), About My Husband (written by me), Our Home and Community, Work & Play (what we do and what our interests are), Our Family, and Our Promise (this is where we wrote about how we plan to raise our child and how we are flexible on how open the adoption is).  

 Now that our text and pictures have been approved, we are going to have a graphic designer put it together for us.  I am just waiting on her to email me back for confirmation that she can take on the project right now.  I'm getting impatient, though.

 

Also, I've heard that a lot of potential birthmoms aren't looking for perfection... they are looking for someone who seems "real".

rach2100

Hi and welcome!  We struggled with what to do for our profile and letter too.

We ended up using MS Publisher which allowed us to enter as much text as we wanted - same with photos.  Then, we took it to Fed-ex Kinkos and they printed it up for us on super nice paper and it sort of looks like a 6 page magazine/newspaper. 

We didn't want it to look 'too professionally done' ...it needed to be realistic in our minds.  And we didn't want to have to put down a huge chunk of change for something that (we thought) should be so simple to put together. 

Good Luck! 

Dr.Loretta

You can do this.

Our agency didn't help us do it. They showed us other profiles, which our SW called The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. She also stressed that all of the profiles we saw were from people who were chosen.

I used scrapblog.com and had our profile done in a matter of hours. If you want to see it, you can PM me. I can also give you some of the guidelines our agency gave us to help us put it together.

 

slaintexas

We found a great program called Scrapbook Factory Deluxe at Target (or any store that sells computer software).  I think it was around $30.  It is super easy to use!  It had a lot of premade templates or you can create your own.  There are tons of options!  After we created it, we took it to Kinkos, had them print, laminate and spiral bind it.  If you want to see it, shoot me a PM with your e-mail address and I'll send it to you.

Alicia_22

You can absolutely do it yourself! Our agency also showed us some examples but didn't give us too much guidance! They of course wanted only a certain number of pages, but other than that, they just said to make it your own! We used Mixbook.com and loved it! They sent a soft book and then I took it to OfficeMax and had them make copies on nice paper to send to our agency. This way I have the book that I can keep. I'll be glad to also send you a link to ours if you would like!

silliestbunny

I LOVE LOVE LOVE Joanna at Our Chosen Child.  She's fantastic.... although it's a business, she's an adoptive mom at heart and has been a great support for us.

Our story-  we are w/a larger adoption organization that states the average wait time is 6-9 months.  After 16 months with nothing even close to a match (never even made it into the final three), we were advised to get a professional profile. That's when we started working w/Joanna.

I really liked my profile I did myself (you can see it at jillandjohnadopt.blogspot. com) but Joanna's version is polished and is much better.    I can email you a copy, if you'd like, so you can compare the two.

Here's my thought--- at first I knew I could do it.  I did not want to incur the additional fees.  But I really wish that we would have started with Joanna since it may have made the difference early on. 

My other thought-  it really depends on what agency you are working with.  If you are working with an agency where many profiles are professional, DO IT!  However, if your agency has more homemade type profiles, you can probably use support from friends, family, and us to get the work done and laid out just fine.  See if your agency will provide you with samples so you know what other profiles look like and use that as part of your decision.

Good luck!

 

Smiley_grl52

I just made our mini-scrapbook that the agency asked us to make in MS Power Point. You can put in lots of pictures and your own text as well. It was really easy.

For our birthparent letters, we had a couple examples that we used to write ours. You can probaby find some examples online. It's pretty simple to do as well.

Good luck!

farmweddinggirl

Jill - I'd love to see what Joanne put together for you.  We're creating our own, but I'm fearful of it not looking polished enough, or not having the right info.  Would you be willing to email me yours?  I loved the one you had on your blog!

I'll send you a PM with my email address.

- Lindsey

AdoptiveMommy

We had a friend do our profile... we did the wording but she put it together and it was amazing... She now does Adoption Profiles and her prices are amazing I will PM you!!

Good Luck and welcome

Ashlene