A Small Grain of Hope

We launched our Parent Profile on January 26th. I really didn't know how I felt about it. It's $50 a month! That seems like a lot to me, especially since we are trying to save every spare dime for adoption, and pay for school on top of that. But we want to be parents and I really want to adopt an infant and so we went ahead with it. The cool part is that they keep track of how many times your profile is seen in one form or another. They have several other "sister sites" and they will highlight a few on those so that increases our exposure. They keep a total count, but you can't take the big number seriously. In some form or another our picture has been up 30,982 times! WOW. But when you break it down, it's not as big.

The important numbers to me are:
Birth mother letter: 836 views
About us: 168 views
Album: 152 views
Favorites: 91 views
Journal: 87 views - that is a lot since we haven't posted anything there. The other day I did add a few things since it is being looked at. I want to link our blog there, but parent profiles won't let you list a website. I think I have found a way around that, but I am still working out the details.
Contact us: 67 views - that number is to me, the important number. They are still interested enough to think about contacting us. Of those 67 views I'm sure a few are family just checking our profile out. Then I had one distant uncle email me through that. I was so MAD! But I emailed back and gave him my email address so hopefully he will be better. Than we had the gal that tried to scam us call and that is where she got our phone number. Than we had the girl that was looking for her pregnant sister; we never heard back from her. Earlier this week we had an agency contact us about a situation they have, but it is way out of our price range. So in about 2-1/2 months we've averaged one contact a month. I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

I was checking our adoption email every hour, hoping for something. I finally realized that was causing to much anxiety on my account, so now I only check it 2 or 3 times a day (okay some days I still check it more like 5 or 6). But I haven't looked at the stat counter on Parent Profiles for about a month.

On Sunday I got on and a new stat was showing.
Added to favorites: 1.
That to me seems like a big deal! Someone likes us enough to bookmark us. I just got on again and that number is now 2! Maybe the agency marked us the first time, but someone else has marked us now!!! I am so excited. But no email yet.

It's been enough to give me a little bit of hope again.

1st Parent Profile Contact

We just received our 1st contact email from Parent Profiles. I can't decide how I feel about it. I want to get excited, but I can't seem to. I think it is partly because our last contact was through parent profiles, but it was over the phone. The excitement we felt was so good. I was going to be a mom. I had a baby girl due in a few months. Her story screamed scam, but I still had to hope. After realizing it was a scam I have been so down. It's hard to get excited when only con artist contact us.

Sometimes this adoption thing gets so hard. We've been married eight years. We only used birth control for like the first 18 months or 2 years. After that we have done nothing to stop a child from coming to our home. THAT'S SIX YEARS!