Shame on me....

For not writing in such a long time!!! And for making everyone wait so long for me to post details about our adoption class!!! I have been getting questions about it all weekend, but have been super busy with our company so I haven't really had a chance to sit down and write. Well I guess I've had plenty of sit-down time, but I wanted to just relax and goof off. :)

So, on Saturday we went out to Tualatin city to attend an adoption class put on by LDS Family Services, our adoption agency. The state of Oregon now requires ten hours of training before you can adopt. Apparently, training includes reading books and watching videos, which we can do on our own time (awesome, huh?! at least I thought so...), but we found out about the class and it sounded kind of neat so we went. I was so glad we did!!! It was a really awesome experience. I didn't necessarily learn a whole lot of new information--a lot of it was going over the new website (currently in the beta aka testing stage, it can be found at beta.itsaboutlove.org) and the different phases. The first phase is Pre-Qualification, the second is Pre-Home Study, the third is Adoption Profile and Preferences, the fourth is Finding Your Child, and the fifth and final phase is Placement (woohoo!). We are currently in the second phase. So we have a long ways to go. We got a neat paper that someone wrote about infertility dos and don'ts (written for family and friends of people who are experiencing IF [infertility]). I'll eventually try to scan in some of those papers to post on here, as I think they are really helpful and informative.

The main thing I enjoyed about the class was the company. I can't tell you how nice it is to be able to associate with people who have walked and are walking in our shoes. We even met a couple from our stake, and the wife is also in the Young Women's program, so I will be seeing her this summer at girls camp!!

I did learn a few interesting things that were helpful, though. We aren't yet to the profile phase (you make a profile with a lot of detailed info about yourselves and your family so your birth mother can pick you!), but when we get there, we have some good ideas. We were told to tell about EVERYTHING we have ever liked. We heard stories where the adoptive couple had a picture of their nursery on their profile, and their birthmom picked them because they had a Winnie the Pooh themed nursery, and she loved Winnie the Pooh!! We heard another story where a birthmom picked the adoptive couple because they liked Beavis and Butthead. And--this was perhaps the strangest story of all--one of the ladies we met at the meeting told us her husband had insisted on putting this picture on their profile of the two of them in front of this buffalo statue on Antelope Island (for all my non-Utah readers, Antelope Island is a big island in the Great Salt Lake). The wife said it wasn't a good picture, and she really didn't want it in the profile, but the husband felt strongly that it should be included, so they put it in. Their birthmother ended up picking them because of that picture, because her family would go there often and posed in front of the very same statue for pictures!!! What are the odds, eh?!

I am really looking forward to the next class!!!