Support Group - Dear Birthparent Letter

Support group #2. There was no one our age. Everyone was 40+ though it sounds like Jeff and I have been married longer then some of them have known each other. The topic was Birthparent letters. I was expecting it to be a family that had recently adopted. Not sure that I would have gone otherwise. I think rather then being helpful it put doubt in my mind. I like our book but have never been too confident with the letter. We purposefully left it brief as we felt the subsequent pages in our book were much better. Well as promised in a much earlier post here is our Dear Birthparent letter:

Hello,

Our names are *our names*! Thank you for taking the time to read our book and we hope that in the next few pages you will get to know us better. We cannot imagine how difficult this journey has been for you but respect that you are making a decision that is best for you and your baby. This book was a great deal of fun to put together but also a little strange because we dont typically write about ourselves.

Early in our dating relationship we talked about having a family. Soon after we were married, we began trying to conceive a child but learned we could not. We always knew we wanted to adopt children so we then turned to adoption.

As we have learned more about the adoption process we have grown to have an appreciation for open adoptions. We would hope to work with our future birth parents to establish an open adoption plan that works for both of our families.

Our family is very important to us and will be a big part of our child's life. Because of this we invited our parents and brother/sisters to each take a page and introduce themselves to you. Our baby will be the first Grandchild on both sides so this process has made both of our parents very excited.

We are very excited to be future parents and share all of our hobbies and interests with them. We also look forward to learning from them and seeing life through new eyes. We plan to speak openly about adoption and believe that he/she should always know and feel your love and we will do everything we can to make sure of that.

~Our Names~

On the next page we have a brief bio of each of us as well as about our relationship accompanied by a photo. Hopefully one day someone will read it and feel a connection. A resource that the agency did provide us (which would have been helpful PRIOR to writing the letter) is: www.achildchosen.com/how-to-write-a-birth-parent-letter/ Also we listened to a clip from This American Life http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/362/got-you-pegged which is in Act Three about a mother reading dear birthparent letters. Hope this helps someone else :)

Dear Birth parents letter

A dear birth parent letter also frequently called a dear birth mom letter is now a portfolio or book more then a letter.  This book is shown to prospective birth parents (BP) that are seeking an adoption plan.  The book is shown to BP's that fit the adoptive parents requirements and vise versa.  So if a BP wants parents that are young and are active then adoptive parents that fit that criteria will be shown to them if the BP meet the requirements of the adoptive parents.   We will fill out a list of criteria including gender, age of baby, drugs BP use, and medical history of the baby/BP's.  The BP look at a few books and then decide which parents they want to meet.  The adoptive agency sets up a meeting for both sets of parents to meet.  If both sets of parents are in agreement the process continues and the adoptive parents and BP set up a plan for the openness of the adoption, as well as how the day of delivery will work.

A lot is riding on this book as this book is the first step to how the BP decides which adoptive parents they want to meet.  DH and I have begun working on the book.  We have set up pages using shutterfly.com.  The reason we are doing an electronic book is that we want our families to create their own pages.  I set up the pages on my own and got pictures organized (so I thought).  I dumped every digital picture we had as an option and then we were over whelmed (aka I was in tears).  We then removed ALL the pictures and started over.  We went through our digital albums and then only uploaded the one's we planned on using.  This helped and the process became fun.

Having our families do their own pages has its pluses and minuses.  Pluses- our family is involved and they now know how much work this process is taking, they also will be able to send messages to the BP of their grandchildren/niece/nephew, and they can provide us with feedback on our parts of the book.  Cons- hand holding is needed, frequent calls to keep people on track and remind them we have a deadline, and they can give us feedback on the book.

The picture part is about 50% done and we have started the writing part.  We have an outline started for the first two pages which is the letter itself (who we are, how did we get to this point, etc).  I will post our final letter on a future blog as we have found lots of sites telling us how to write a letter but no good examples.  We have written about our house, pets, and hobbies/fun activities.  We have created a new saying which is "thats too Geri Reiley, " or "ok Geri Reiley" (Geri Reiley is a local real estate agent that listed a house we looked at double dipping on space by listing the garage as a "room" as well as a garage).  Keeping things light and realizing you can always go back has helped... We still have a little over two weeks to get it done.

This week we both have our individual interviews as well as our meeting with the pediatrician.  Exciting week :)