Hello, everyone! If you’ve been following the blog you know that my wife and I have started the domestic infant adoption journey again. I want to share with you an update on where we are on our journey.
If you haven’t already checked it out, read about how our first adoption journey went. You can also check out how our second adoption journey started. I hope this insight into our story will give you some inspiration and help on your journey.
Well, it’s been 16 months and we’re still waiting – no match and things seem pretty quiet. We are hopeful and 
prayerful that we’ll get a call soon. We are working with Lifetime Adoption Center as we had for our first adoption. Lifetime has us all over the web at sites such as OpenAdoption.com, AdoptionTree.com, and Lifetimeadoption.com.
With a lot of exposure on the web, we feel that since we’ve been waiting for a while we need to update our profile video. We’ve already updated our profile once – and now we’ve ordered our adoption outreach cards. If you haven’t heard about adoption outreach cards, they are small cards that are about the size of business cards. You can use them to promote your adoption plans and exposure to potential birth mothers.
The cards show pictures, some quick points about who you are, and your contact information. I recommend ordering these because you never know where your birthmother will hear about you – so by spreading these cards around it is another avenue to make a possible connection with her.
Even though we are updating some of our profile, here’s a little inspirational tidbit…no matter how much you fret over your profile, your audio or video, ordering adoption outreach cards – you never know how a birthmother will pick you.
Our daughter’s birthmother told us the story about how she knew that she wanted to match with us. When she got a packet of profiles from Lifetime, she pulled our profile out first. She saw our picture on the front…and just knew we were to be the parents of her baby. She looked at the other profiles – and even watched our DVD over and over, but it was the first look at our picture that did it for her.
Keeping it real
Does this mean that you should not consider changes to your profile or video to make it better? No. But it does mean that you shouldn’t drive yourself crazy over making the “perfect” profile. We’ve learned that the most important thing when creating or changing your profile is keeping it real.
You have to show your true life, your true selves in words, pictures, audio or video – no matter how goofy you may think you are. There have been many times during our journey that we’ve looked at our paper profile or video and thought that we sounded too goofy or not funny enough or this, or that.
You don’t know what your birthmother will end up loving about you. She may love the fact that you have a dog, or that you have the warmest smiles, or that your favorite things are the same as hers. You just never know – so you have to be who you are.
If you have been waiting for a long time without hearing anything from a birthmother – or if you just don’t like how your profile looks or sounds, I would seriously consider making some changes. Even if you really like how it is – and it captures your life well, you should consider adding audio, video, adoption cards, or your own website to your adoption profile. Check out my blog post about adoption profiles for more information and resources.
As for us, when we get the profile video updated I’ll let you know so you can check it out for yourself. We are very excited and anxiously waiting for the call – to let us know that our birthmother has found us, wants to match with us, and make the most loving decision to have us parent her baby. We know that it will happen in God’s perfect timing.
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New Post: Another month goes by:An update of our domestic adoption journey bit.ly/zaJTNG
— Tim Elder (@tim4adoption) January 25, 2012
