Waiting...Waiting...Waiting

We now entered the hardest and probably longest part of our adoption...waiting for a referral.  We are officially finished with our homestudy.  I will get the completed report in a few days.  This is good because I need the paperwork to start apply for grants and loans.  And although the waiting is no fun, I have plenty to do to fill my time.

First of all, I have to finish our profile book.  We have to put together 20 pages of pictures and information about ourselves.  That is a big job!!  If I were to give someone advice on how to do this, here are the steps I would give them:
1. Google profile book and review other ones out there.
2. Write down ideas for pages by looking at sample books.  Our agency also gave us some ideas.
3. Make a folder on your desktop for each page.  For example, I have a folder title "Our pets," "Our home," "Marriage," etc.
4. Start looking through your pictures, which should mostly be digital, and copy good ones into the appropriate folder.
5. Find a program, like Shutterfly.com, that you want to use to make your book. I'm not sure about other programs, but one thing I really like about Shutterfly is you can turn your book into a .pdf to send to your agency to approve it before you get it printed.
6. Now all you have to do is design each page and add the pictures from your folders. This part takes the longest.

Right now I'm almost halfway finished with putting all the pictures in the book.  After that, I will add text to each page.  Here is a list of the pages I'm doing:

Dear Birthmother letter
Timeline
Dating and Marriage
Monkey
Boogie
Our Home
Baby's Room
Our Community
Our Pets
Pasture's Family
My Family
Church
Friends
Vacations
Holidays
Fun Activities/Hobbies

Trying to sum each of those things into one page is almost impossible.

Now for the exciting news!!  We have a potential match.  It is actually a lady who I have mentioned before in this post Rollercoasters.  I will call her Birthmother A.  We were told about her originally on March 7.  At that time, all we knew was that she wanted an open adoption, and she did not know what she was having.  A little later, as you also know from the previous post, we were told about a second mother, I will call Birthmother B.  Birthmother B was due April 16.  However, our agency felt that she was unsure of her decision to make an adoption plan, so they put the adoption on hold.  After several days of not hearing anything I found out that Birthmother B decided to keep her baby.  Also at that time I learned that the agency had lost contact with Birthmother A.

Late last week I found out that Birthmother A had contacted the agency again and wanted our information.  I'm sure our agency had mentioned us in the past.  We found out that she is having a baby boy and is due in early August.  She lives very close and would like to have updates and annual visits.  So, now I am in a rush to get our profile book finished so she can look at it!