My mother was mentioning how different the referral process was for me. When she adopted me and my sister, she had to wait a long time between the completion of the homestudy and the referral picture. Not only that, she had to wait a long time to see the pictures even after she received word of the referral. We received our referral a couple of weeks after the homestudy was completed and we saw our picture the day after we were notified that we had been matched with a little boy. Not only that, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, most of our family saw the picture the same day that we did.

My mother also brought up how hard it was to tell anything from the pictures. According to her, my picture was pretty much right on the money. My sister, however, was different. When we got her picture, she was really a homely looking baby in her picture. She looked huge and she had this big mass of stick-up black hair. Thank goodness my parents weren’t looking for a glamour baby because she wasn’t it – or was she. When she arrived, she was a beautiful little baby girl. She had tons of personality (laughing that first night) and she was small. The moral of the story would be that pictures don’t always tell the whole story. Now she is 5’2” (if you don’t include the heels) and her part-time job during college was modeling.

When we received pictures of my son, he looked like he was a really round baby. I loved his wild hair and his cheeks. As time went by and we waited for the travel, each set of pictures seemed to show an increasingly large baby who looked much too big for his age. By the time his arrival day came, I had really prepared myself for a big baby to come from that plane. So, when they brought down this little baby (with all his hair shaved off), I didn’t recognize him at first. The big boy that I had been expecting was really a very little baby boy.

When we start the process for our second, I will enjoy my pictures, but I think that I’ll remember not to throw away the six month clothes before I hold the baby in my arms.