Background on the Letter

I realized my last post about finishing our birth mother letter might need some clarification. I did have a friend at work design our first copy, which the IAC sent back to us with recommendations for a lot of revision. As much as I appreciate help on this, my friend travels a lot for work and has a lot on his plate, and we just couldn't get together for a large block of time to work on this. We're not very close friends, and not even in the same department at work, so as the time frame began to drag on I got more impatient but didn't want to really push the issue. After all, I approached him about it; before that he didn't even know we were adopting. So really I just needed to bite the bullet, sit down, and get this thing done. I did the major design of it around some of the concepts he came up with, so he really did get me off on the right foot to putting it together. I'm quite picky when it comes to project type stuff anyway, so once I got going on what I wanted to do I kind of got into it.

I cruised around the IAC site a bit clicking on prospective families today in search of other letters. We'd seen some hard copies while at our seminars at their offices last spring, but I wanted to see what was currently out there. As I suspected, some of the families had posted their letters on their individual websites. I would say as far as the look of the letter, ours has to be in the top 70% or so presentation wise. I'm glad our counselor Lane is strict about what he likes, because some of those websites are well...not what I'd expect to see, at least not if I was a birth parent looking for a family to place with.

We'll just have to see what they come back with as far as revisions. I did a quick test print in black and white and I was right, a lot of the cell lines and borders don't print out, so it has a pretty clean look. Fingers crossed! We'd like to be in the book any week now if possible...time's a wastin'!