It's Official!

I came home from clinicals today to a message on our answering machine from Becky (SW). Her supervisor has signed off on our home study and we are "officially" approved. YAY! It's not feeling quite real yet for me. When I see our picture and birth parent letter on the waiting family page maybe... We've made a few changes to our portfolio and I just need to print out a couple more pages. I think it looks really good (thanks again mom!). Our portfolio really is a family project. My mom helped with the layout and design of the pages. Mark's mom is going to make some covers for the portfolios themselves.

So... you may be wondering what exactly is an adoption portfolio? This is a 3 ring binder that the birth families can view to get to know us a little bit. The first page is a "profile" of Mark and I (age, profession, hobbies, salary, etc). Then, we have page 1 of our "dear birth parent" letter - kind of giving an introduction to who we are. This is followed by pics and some info about us, our family, home, community, life, travels, activities. After that, there is more of our letter, talking about our journey to adoption, plans for parenting, etc. We ended with kind of a fun page, "Mark and Melanie in Twenty Questions." It is probably my favorite page in the whole portfolio. It has a picture of us very light in the background of the page. Not sure if there is a way to post a link to it or not... I may have to experiment.

In the middle of my day today, I all of a sudden had this peaceful feeling come over me and a quiet "voice" that seemed to whisper, "I have the perfect child planned for you." Now, don't get me wrong - I know that our child will not be perfect! Believe me... my parents are probably hoping for a little bit of "payback" for the child (and teenager) that I was. Anyway, Mark has made this comment several times and I actually included it in our portfolio to describe our relationship. "We may not be perfect, but we're perfect for each other." So, I think the same perspective should apply to our child - our child may not be perfect, but God is handpicking our child for us and since HE is perfect, the same applies to His choice of our child. I can't wait to see what He has in store!