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Standing Apart from the Crowd
3 Tools to Get You Noticed By Kelly Burgess
The "business cards" were cute shaped like a little heart, half pink and half blue Lacey Stephan* recalls. She would hand them out to people at parties, at the office and at the dental offices where she made her calls as a dental products sales representative. But the "business" on her cards had nothing to do with teeth and everything to do with babies.
"When we decided to adopt, we did a lot of research and found out that the best way to get a baby, specifically an infant, was to get your name and face and desires out there in a way that was very feminine, very maternal," says Stephan of Palo Alto, Calif. "Being chosen by a birth mother seems to boil down to someone deciding they like what represents you, whether it's a picture or a card or whatever, so we did it all."
It paid off, too, as Stephan prepares to celebrate the first birthday of her son, Michael.
"I did ask the birth mother what drew her to us because there are hundreds of couples profiled on that site, not to mention people who place ads in papers and many, many other adoption sites as well," Stephan says. "She said that she just liked the way we looked at each other in one of our pictures, like we were so in love we didn't want to look away to the camera. She wanted someone she felt would stay together."
Because the Stephans wanted aCaucasian child, it took them a little more than a year from the time they first started aggressively trying to find a baby until they got Michael. However, Stephan feels certain it would have taken a lot longer if they hadn't spread the word over so many venues. In addition to the business cards, they placed ads in newspapers, contacted Catholic parishes in their region and had relatives and friends in different states do the same.