99.9% Done, Part 2

As I mentioned earlier, I seriously overestimated how many photos I could fit into our profile. Here's how many I printed out:

Here's how many I had left over:

Whoops.  I have to say, we are so blessed to have so many special family and friends to provide so many memories for us!  We hated to cut any out.  The ones we had to cut out were only because we didn't have a clear enough or recent enough picture.  We really have an amazing number of precious people in our lives.  The extra pictures went here, in this cool mobile my mom gave us for Christmas:

and also here, in our Everyday Display.  And we still have tons left over.  Like I said, whoops!

Now, if you can use your imagination for a moment, you can pretend to be a birth mom or birth dad.  You're in a tougher situation than you ever imagined and are considering choosing another family to parent your child.  Here's what you'd see as you turn the pages of our profile.  It's probably in between the profiles of many other families you're considering:

You might notice that these pictures are set so that you can't enlarge them.  If you'd like the real pictures sent to you, I'm happy to do that!  (Amanda, I haven't forgotten that you want them!  :)  )  Just let me know!  If you've read our other blog, you know that I'm a bit cautious (or paranoid) about internet security stuff.  So I didn't want all the details on our profile to be viewable by those I don't know.

The profile you see above is in the format required by Bethany.  (It was tricky to conform to their formula, and to do it multiple times.)  This is the one I made 5 copies of.  If you look at the first four pages only, that's considered the letter to birthparents, and I made 20 copies of that.  I think the idea is that if someone finds us on the internet or some other way and needs to have information about us mailed to them by Bethany, Bethany will only mail the birthparent letter because they don't know whether they'll get it back.  And from what I understand, the other copies of our complete profile will be placed in the binders of other Bethany offices.

I spent time praying for the birth mom or parents, and baby, while I was making these things.  I hope you'll pray for them, too.  Nobody has seen our profile yet, as we're still waiting on our fingerprint clearances.  My friend, Anna, commented today, "Is it just me, or has all this happened really quickly?"  It really has.  We have gone through this part of the process really fast.  Even though the wait may be long, at this point we're still excited and not feeling impatient.  Maybe that's because life is very full and still keeping us pretty busy!

Even though this profile-making part of the process was something I looked forward to, and I did find it satisfying, I'm very happy and relieved that it's done.  It was hard to decide how to do it, and once we did, it took a tremendous amount of time to do it.  I spent many naptimes and evenings working on it.  If I had to do it again, there are some things that I'd simplify, but really, it's such a large quantity of copies that there are only so many things you can do to make the job smaller.  I'm happy to have it completed.