“To our future little person…”

This is how we began the introduction in a photo book called “Our Adventures in Waiting: 2010-2011” that we created for our child. You can see the photo book in the post below. We’ll share some of the text here since it is hard to read in the online version.

The introduction continues, “We’ve been waiting a long time for you. While we don’t know when you’ll join our family, we know you will be worth the wait and we’ll love you very much. This album is to show you all the things we thought about until there was you.”

The story behind the book is simple. Susan had a Shutterfly coupon which gave her the perfect opportunity to try creating a photo book. At first it was hard to decide on a theme for the book, but then we had the idea to create the book for our future child with photos that we took while we were waiting for him or her to arrive.

Before we decided to adopt, it was rare that we took photographs, especially of just us. However, we quickly realized we needed to take a lot more pictures in preparing for our adoption letter and Facebook page. Sometimes it’s been a struggle to take pictures, but we’re glad that we have them. We appreciate the family, friends, and even kind strangers who have helped us to take these photos.

The 8”x8” hardcover book turned out as wonderful as we hoped. It’s a pleasure to look at it and reflect on all the things we’ve done while we’ve been waiting. Many of the photos such as the ones at the zoo and the Orange County Fair are visual reminders of the places we’re planning to visit with our child. We can imagine him or her enjoying the pandas or the Ice Museum at the fair alongside us. And someday, we hope to share these pictures with our child so he or she will know how much we looked forward to his or her arrival and presence in our lives. We also plan to give copies of future photo books to grandma and our child’s birthmother (if she’s up for that).

The book ends with photos of us trimming our Christmas tree and the text, “Preparing for Christmas 2011 – hopefully you’ll be here next Christmas.” That’s our greatest wish for 2012.

Our Adventures in Waiting: 2010-2011

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly allows you to customize your photo book just the way you want.

Hello & Welcome

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out our new adoption blog. We’ve created this blog for a few reasons. First, it gives us a chance to express ourselves more fully than we possibly could have done in our 1000 word adoption letter. We hope to give everyone who reads this blog a deeper sense of who we are, why we want to adopt a child, and the vision we have for our child once we are blessed with a little boy or girl through open adoption.

Next, this blog is a good place to be current. While our letter went a long way to illustrate who we are, many things have happened to us since we created it in April 2011. Our Facebook page helps keep everyone up to date and we love sharing quick updates, fun stuff, and new photos. However, we often want to say more than Facebook allows, and a blog is ideal for longer thoughts.

Also, part of our journey has been to learn as much as we can about adoption. We’ve found that blogs are a good way for us to connect to the larger adoption community that we share with other waiting families, adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoption professionals. This connection is helpful for us now while we are waiting and continuing to learn, and undoubtedly will be invaluable to our future child as he or she develops and matures.

We appreciate everyone who is supporting us through this process. Thank you so much for your kindness, consideration, and good wishes. We couldn’t do this without you!