57 Days

I've been meaning to write a post for a while but with an infant things can be a little hectic.  I wanted to share some of the things that we did that helped us welcome our little girl home 57 days after we started actively looking.  The main things I'm going to mention are our own website, twitter, Google Adwords and Google Analytics but first, just a little bit of history.  I’m going to post each one separately as I finish them but hopefully they should all be done today.

I'm not spend much time on our back story at all but basically we started our adoption journey at the end of June and we currently have a seven week old baby girl. June was our first meeting with the agent that we chose, Adoption Center for Family Building in Skokie, IL, just outside of Chicago. That was the initial consultation and discussions about how this process worked and the next steps. We would have a few more meetings with them as we completed our home study which we finished in October.

The next big step was our Dear Birthmother letter and bio.  This took quite a bit of time to get through a couple of revisions of the first draft but once we were satisfied with it we forwarded the wording to our adoption coordinator and set up a meeting for the following week in order to review it.  When we sat down with her, we really expected her to want to change a lot of it but lucky she was really pretty happy with it.  Some changes were made with how we worded some things and we cleaned up some areas where we maybe had too much detail and added spots that needed a little more explanation.  We were really happy with her feedback and we also spent some time looking at examples of other books to get an idea of a layout that we liked and we decided on what pictures to have throughout the book.  We left with a good idea of how the book was going to look and we got started on it when we got home.  

We used Microsoft Publisher for the layout.  If you can use Microsoft Word you can use Publisher.  It was very easy to get all of the txt where we wanted it and insert pictures and borders and get everything formatted how we wanted it.  Our printed book was done on four pages of legal sized paper, printed on both sides and folded in half for a total of sixteen pages with only the back page left blank.  Publisher was great because it set up everything to print automatically to get the pages in the proper ordert o fold into a booklet. That might not sound like anything special but take 4 sheets of paper and fold them into a booklet and then write the page number on each of them just like you were reading it.  Now separate them back into individual sheets and you can see where printing double sided and folding it could get messy. It was super easy to take it to Kinkos, stick it in a self service kiosk and have a beautiful book printed in a few minutes.  The other very important feature that Publisher has is the ability to export to .PDF format.  This was for our agency’s website so it could be downloaded by anyone using their site.  Viola! We have a physical and digital copy of our book.  Up next, the website.