I know I said end of February... but how does early April sound?

Well, it has taken us a bit longer to get the paperwork in order that we expected. I think we said our goal was to have the website up by March 1st, well, mmm, not so much. We did our financial report, child abuse report update (as in, have we done that in the last 18 months), new government paperwork, and I had a physical last week, Chris is on deck for this week. We are glad though, that we don't have to have all of the paperwork notarized again. Our social worker called us to check in, and after she receives all of the paperwork she'll be in touch about updating the homestudy to include our wishes to also adopt domestically.

Today we spent the whole day working on our "dear birthmother letter". Ugh, this is hard. I am so wordy- I write just like I talk- (which is a huge suprise to those of you who read this blog!). Chris and I started this morning and one of us would work on it- sent it to the other who would read, review add, then send it back. Right now it sounds really dry, and we're debating on how gushy it should sound. We're not typically ooey, gooey people, but if could turn off potential birth mothers if we're too clinical. We have a bit of time before it goes live, so we are going to sit on it for a bit and then have a few people help us edit it. I have some English teacher friends, and Chris has some author friends so they may be able to help us creat a cohesive document.

I have to admit I am having a hard time with this process at this exact moment. I am totally having an "it's not fair" fit. Why is this so hard? Why is this taking so long? Why is nothing guaranteed? Boo hoo, I know. A lot of people have many other hardships- this is ours.

So far, we've sent out a letter to our friends and family asking for good pictures of us, next step, get an approved homestudy, get a new cell phone + 1-800 number for potential birthmoms to call, write letter to family and friends explaining purpose of dear birthmother letter and asking for assistance, mass produce the letter, create 4-8 copies of a scrapbook that is essentially a hardcopy of our website, so we can give these to our lawyer, start passing letters out to family and friends, and then begin handing them out to everybody, place ads in newspapers... then hopefully have responses!

Lots to do!