It’s been a full two months now since we’ve been actively presented to birthmothers and have been waiting for a match. Yesterday we got our second monthly update from our caseworker telling us how many birthmothers we were presented to in November and the status of those presentations.

I look forward to this email all month (even though receiving it means we haven’t yet been chosen). We’re pretty removed from this part of the process, so it’s nice to know what’s been going on behind-the-scenes.

The Update

Our profile was shown to nine birthmothers this month, one every few days in November. That’s one more than last month.  Five of them were matched with other couples, (one already had the baby!) two fell off the radar, and two have not yet chosen a couple.

The cool thing about this month was that out of the five birthmothers who were successfully matched, one actually picked us as their third choice. So if her first and second choice matches said no, we would have gotten the call! She was successfully matched with her first choice, but hey, at least we were chosen as runners-up. Although third is not first, it feels like getting chosen at all is a step in the right direction. It’s a reminder that it could happen any time. Our caseworker told me that she was surprised to hear our names come up so fast and that even a 3rd choice after only two months of waiting is good news. That made us smile.

Our caseworker told me that, on average, birthmothers are each shown about 70 profiles that fit the criteria she is looking for and where her situation fits what the adoptive parents are looking for. So every time we are presented to a birthmother, it’s along with a whole big stack of other parent profiles. How overwhelming that must be. That’s a lot of profiles to choose from, but we hope when the right birthmother sees our profile, she won’t want to look at any others. Hopefully someday soon, we will be someone’s first choice!