The Profile

Now that we had a consultant, our next step was to complete our profile. An adoption profile is basically a scrapbook of your life (where you live, your values/beliefs, what you enjoy doing, etc.) that a birthmom would look at to choose a family for her child. The profile book is a relatively new concept; I know people who adopted 15 years ago who have never heard of such a thing. It has evolved from the "dear birthmom" letter of the past, and will often incorporate a letter to the birthmom in the profile itself. Most people opt to digitally scrapbook their profiles, as you need several copies and it can be expensive (not to mention time consuming) to exactly replicate 6+ scrapbooks. There are several software options out there, as well as websites, to help you digitally scrapbook a profile. I liked the idea of a website for several reasons: 1) If anything happened to my computer, the profile would still exist, 2) I could work on the profile from any computer, and 3) I could email the link to the profile-in-progress to other people to get their opinions. After some searching, I came across the website Mixbook and it was just what I was looking for. They offer either a softcover or hardcover option, several different sized books, tons of embellisments, lots of space to write (a problem I found with other digital scrapbooking/photography sites), and it was free to join. I highly recommend ordering an 8.5"x11" size profile book in softcover. The hardcover version is a nice keepsake for yourself, but it's more expensive to both purchase and to ship; the 8.5"x11" size books are the easiest to ship to an agency. Mixbook has a 20-page minimum on any book, which sounded like too much at first, but was much easier to fill than I initially thought. The softcover books start at $20 for a 20-page book, which seems like a lot until you consider that there's no way to actually scrapbook an entire 20 page book for $20. Plus, we received a 30% off a first purchase coupon, which really helped offset the cost. The only catch was that I had to use the 30% off within a week of joining the website! It was tough, but I managed to complete our profile and order it within the time frame. I am very happy with the quality of the final product, and would definitely order from Mixbook again.

Writing a profile can be rather daunting. You are basically "selling" yourself as if you were a product, trying to make your profile stand out to a birthmom, but still staying true to who you are. I had serious writer's block, so I started by gathering pictures. I knew basically what types of pictures I wanted--our house, a playground nearby, family, traveling, hobbies, pets--and once I had those together, I found it much easier to write a paragraph based on a few photos. I also searched the web for adoption profiles and used those examples to help me write. Once we received our completed profiles from Mixbook, our consultant started searching for situations for us, and we were ready to "hurry up and wait!"