[quiescentfury]

My Agency is very eager to get our picture profile. I have not even started on that yet. I have no idea where to start!!! Does anyone have advice??

[sissyminsky]

First, get those pictures together. You will want too have a variety of together and apart, with family and friends, with children you know.

Second, how long you make the profile depends on your agency. I think ours is 16 pages with picture and letter pages. Our agency encouraged us each to write a letter. We are language people so they were a bit long. Most of the time they prefer letters to be pretty short and to the point.

*Be sure to address why you are doing transracial adoption.

The more your profile truly reflects you, the better chance you can connect with a p-bmother who has a similar outllook or wants people with your characteristics to parent her child.

Sissy

[DebCsMom]

First collect all the pictures you may want in the profile. When we did ours, what ever we were talking about are the pictures we had there. We had pix of us together, apart, with family, friends, vacations, our children, pets, our house, yard, etc. If you are adopting trans-racially & if you have family/friends who are of that race, make sure to add them. The PBMom will want to see that her child will have others in her/his child's life of the same race...if possible.

If you have the nursey started or done, show a picture of that.

Some places want it kept simple, but with us the more pictures we had available, the more the PBMom could get a better sense of who we were. I don't know if they will allow it, but here is ours to look at as a sample. You can PM me too for it. On Paper I had it on pretty paper that fit what I was talking about. It's old though, like 2 1/2 years old.

http://www.geocities.com/debbi3c/RainbowBlessings.html

GOOD LUCK! Have fun!!!

Deb

[Casey677]

I bought a scrapbooking software program (Scrapbook Factory Deluxe) to do ours. The first thing that I did was write my letter in a Word document. I think it was three pages. I then divided each section into its own page (i.e. Dear Birth Family, Me Through Dh's Eyes, Dh Through my Eyes, Our Families- 2 pages, 1 per family, Our Home, and Our Promise to You.) and then added photos and formatting to each page. I used the same color scheme and a similar layout throughout. Our letter ended up being 7 pages long and then we added 3 photo pages at the end with about 8 photos per page. Be sure to use LOTS of photos! We used about 40 total photos, with captions under them all.

Casey

[redhedded]

We kept ours simple, as neither of us cares for the crowded look. I bought a ream of simple (not baby/or cutesy) paper from Office Max, typed the narrative in Word and added several photo boxes on each page; I left the boxes blank. I printed 11 copies (one to keep) of each page of narrative, copied my photos at home (had a good photo copier) and pasted the photos in the box. Our "profile" ended up being about 15-20 pages (medium text) and about 20 photos, all candid. I bought the inexpensive plastic small binders (with hard paper back and metal brads) and put them together. At the back of the book we had an About Us at a glance page, a graph with age, job, education, kind of residency (urban, rural, suburban), likes/dislikes, etc, which our agency suggested. BTW, I suggest not making too many at first; I think we made ten. While we had two failed matches, we were chosen each time we were presented. After our daughter was born, our agency returned a stack of them to us; they are still in my closet.

Good luck. Just write what you feel and show photos that truly exhibit what your lives are like.