How to Create a Successful Adoption Portfolio: Easy Steps to Help You Produce the Best Adoption Profile and Prospective Birthparent Letter

This book is awesome!

This is an absolute must read if you are going to adopt a baby and need to create a family book (a photo and text book about yourselves). My husband and I are preparing for an open adoption and the part of the process that we were most worried about was creating our family book. It seemed like an enormous, insurmountable task that I might end up spending hundreds of hours on. On the website of the agency we're working with we can look at other people's books, but since those are books of people who haven't yet been picked, that wasn't very reassuring! So I went online to try to find some help. I crossed my fingers and ordered this book and couldn't have been more relieved when I started reading it. One thing that was great is that it's a quick, easy read and the information is very well organized. So even if you're not a big reader, it's easy to zip through the whole thing & make notes all over the place. Then you can easily go back and find what you want to reread when you're working on a certain part of your book. It also has lots of sample pictures and text so you can see what she's talking about and don't have to just imagine it. My husband and I both read this cover to cover before starting on our family book and finishing, the task went from feeling completely overwhelming to feeling totally do-able. Our book went much faster than we thought and we're really happy with what we came up with (our counselor loves it too!). The most valuable part of the book, in my opinion, is that Madeline Melcher talked with the founder of Birth Mom Buds, the largest online community for birth moms. In the book she includes information on what expectant moms are looking and thinking about when choosing a family for their child. It made it easier for us to think what to focus on in our book - what expectant parents would want to know about us and what things would not be as important to include. There were also lots of little but very important tips about how to phrase things ...