Four years later, we're online again...

Four years ago this past Sunday, Eric and I had our first date. I think most of you know we met online. I remember the relief of removing my Match profile, thinking I'll never have to do this again.
And here we are - online together.

Just as in the dating version, there is an art to crafting a profile for a birth mom. It's a painful task - kind of like one of those exercises where you end up finding muscles you didn't know you had. First, the exercise is an overwhelmingly strange feeling. Then you try to determine what's wrong - there seems to be a high level of viscosity in your movements - everything is slow - as though you're moving through molasses. Then it becomes painful. This isn't natural. It's contrived. It couldn't be right. You keep trying. Then one day - all falls into place. It becomes fluid.

That's the way writing this text has felt to me.

It has been extremely difficult. It is so strange to make a twelve page, 42 picture (no, I'm not exaggerating) profile about your life. The first version of text I showed to our case worker was fine - but she said we had nothing that made us stand out. We needed more specific things for someone to connect to - so I was forced to reveal more. Instead of just talking about how much we love our families - we needed to talk about hosting Thanksgiving, Fourth of July parades, French traditions, etc. etc. etc.

Below is a link to our profile online. It does not look anything like the amazing 12 page one our designer created, but the text is the same - and the pictures are from it. The first photo is on the cover.

We started getting shown to birth moms this week, and we'll get a report somewhere between the 1st and 10th of every month telling us exactly how many have seen our profile as well as any feedback. The average number of birth moms we expect to get shown to each month is 5-7. Apparently, last month was unusually high for couples with our criteria - we would have been presented to twelve. {That's the kind of information I don't need to know from the case worker.}

Here is the link: http://www.adopthelp.org/parentprofiles/emily-and-eric.html