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| Photo by Mindy Newton Photography |
All adoptive families who are hoping to adopt a baby here in the United States create some type of profile book.
As you'll see, for all intents and purposes, it's a brag book. (And if you know me well, you know I don't like to brag.)
However, in order for a birth mother or birth parents to feel comfortable choosing us to raise their child, they have to be able to imagine their child growing up in our family.
To help facilitate that, we have to share about ourselves. Share who we are. Share where we live. Share what our son is like. Share about the contact we have with Noah's birth mother. Share about our future hopes and dreams for our children and our family.
The profile book often serves as a birth parents' first impression of an adoptive family.
For that reason, I spent A LOT of time writing the text (and rewriting the text) and choosing the 50+ photos from the thousands of pictures on my computer.
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| Top right photo by Mindy Newton | All others taken by me |
Once I had my photos selected and the text written, all I had to do was choose a Mixbook theme (or template). Luckily, Mixbook offers over 100 great themes! I was drawn to this one because of its simple design and bright colors.
Because it was originally a recipe book, I had to delete some elements, modify others, and add text boxes and photos. But it was super easy because Mixbook's editor is a dream to use! Seriously, it's awesome! I've created photo books on other websites (namely Shutterfly) and using Mixbook was much easier and much faster.
Plus, Mixbook gave us a volume discount because we were ordering so many books at one time.
All I had to do was email the volume sales department. (If you'll be ordering 10 or more photo books, you can request a discount by going to the Mixbook home page. Scroll down to the very bottom and under Programs, click "Volumes Discounts." Enter in your information and a Mixbook representative will get back to you in 1-2 days.)
In total, we ordered 17 books; 15 copies for our attorney (who will share them with birth parents) and two copies for us. (I plan to put one copy in our daughter's baby book, so she can look through it when she's older. I did the same thing for Noah, too.)
With the volume discount, we paid just $10.49 per book. Sweet!
Mixbook also supplied us with a free PDF file of our profile book. We forwarded the PDF file to our attorney. In some adoption situations, time is of the essence and it is much faster for birth parents to view the PDF file than to request a copy of your profile and wait for it to arrive in the mail.
Just for the record, I did not receive any compensation or free product for this post. I just really liked working with Mixbook! :-)
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| All photos taken by Brian & edited by me |
It's definitely a goal of mine to share more about the process this time than I did with our first adoption. Not only for me, but also for our family and friends and for any prospective adoptive parents who are interested in learning more about domestic adoption.
With that in mind, next week, I'll be describing one more way we're getting the word out about our desire to adopt.
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