The Family Profile

Your Letter and Photo Collage

By Jessica Williams

Your Pets:
If you have furry family members, include a section devoted to them. They are probably a big part of your life, and you should be proud of how well you care for them.

Your Lifestyle:
Do you and your family take a trip every year? Or do you help coach your nephew's soccer team? Include a large section of photos documenting your interests, traditions and general lifestyle.

Yourselves:
Perhaps most of all, birth parents want to see a variety of pictures of you. Hernon says a photo of her chosen adoptive family at Disneyland really caught her eye. "It was not very important that the family was major rich, but that they could provide the extras I couldn't," she says. "That picture definitely spoke to me." Some couples provide photos of themselves when they were children for variety. Be creative.

"The biggest thing that we wanted to capture was our true selves," says Nevara. "We wanted to provide the birth parent(s) with as much insight as to who we are, what we like to do and who we like to be around. That being said, we wanted to capture us hanging out with friends and family and being outside and playing and just being together stable, at peace, the kind of people that can be entrusted to parent."

When editing your letter, get advice from loved ones and your adoption agency counselor if he is familiar with the process. It's natural to want to outline your entire life in hopes that you'll strike just the right chord with a birth parent,but listing all of your hobbies and interests will make for a very long read.

Instead, keep to your "core" lifestyle. Paint a picture of the hobbies that interest you the most, and keep your views on the world concise and brief.

Want to see more?

• The Adoption Homestudy: Necessary Evil or Helpful Experience?
• Where Do I Start? Adoption Information for Beginners
• Domestic Adoption: Building a Family
• Talk about it!