The meeting went well

We were over-prepared for our meeting with the adoption consultant. Todd & I completed all sorts of forms -- which aren't due yet. That's ok. It will come in handy. Our instructions weren't clear, so I was stressed about filling out all of the forms we were instructed to download.

Some of the pictures that we liked -- they weren't so into. Some of the pictures they were into weren't our favorites, but that's ok. We'll still make the book our own. I really want to use excerpts from the great letters that we've received so far. One of the profile books we looked through had letters included. The adoption consultant said that was because it was a single person and that they needed a little something extra. We're going to pick a sentence or two from a few of them and find a place to include them.

We've paid the consultant a bit of money... but we'll save some bucks by designing the book & doing all of the photoshop stuff ourselves. Our schedule: get some more photographs of my family (I'll be in NC in two weeks and in Fla the following, so I should round it out). Write the verbiage & email it back / forth to the consultant so that they can edit it. Once we're done -- she will go ahead & put us in the pool of candidates! I think we can finish the book by the end of November!

Our next step: start the home study. This is something that you HAVE to do to work through an agency. She gave us a folder of information on a social worker that she likes and thought it would be a good fit because she just moved her office to Marietta from Douglasville. We'll begin that at the beginning of December. The consultant said that was good b/c we'd get a jump on the slew of people who want to start it in the new year.

We learned something by reading through all of the materials: to go with independent adoption, you don't have to have a home study done. We're going to pursue both -- just to see what yields faster results.

I guess that's all for now. 1 - work on Lifestyle Profile. 2 - complete Home Study. We'll have a handle on both by the end of the year. yay!

I'm going to crash (early). We were up late last night / early this morning to work on this stuff. G'night.