I know right? It’s a little awkward. We’re all up on the blogs talking about how we are hoping to adopt and in some ways it feels kind of like we’re promoting ourselves in some strange ploy to either get attention, or gain sympathy. Hopefully you don’t actually feel that way, but we worried it might get weird when we started talking about doing this. So why exactly are we “sharing our journey” anyway?
WARNING: This post gets really nerdy. Much like Craig in his spandex biking outfit.
It’s true we do want to keep a journal about the adoption process, and share our story with those who can support us…but to be honest – we’re naturally a little more private than this, and would not naturally choose to share our dirty laundry with the world (and even ask the world to help us share it with strangers). So the truth is, we actually do have some self-serving, self-promotional ulterior motives to being here: it’s because doing this will help our chances of finding our future child (or more accurately: our future child’s birth mother).
How will this help our chances? Because it’s actually more likely we will connect with future baby’s birth mother through our own networking, than from birth mom walking into an adoption agency and picking us out of a profile book. In fact, last year at Lutheran Social Services, for every 2 adoptions that came from their profile book, there were 3 that resulted from personal networking. Let’s look at this using greater-than (>) and less than sign (<).
Where N(etworking) = 3, and W(aiting) = 2
N > W
Obligatory social networking image featuring bathroom sign people holding hands
So with that in mind, we thought we should probably try this networking thing…and the agency made it clear that we would have to stretch beyond our comfort zone a little bit. It works kinda like this: you know us (or at least you know of us), and you also know a lot of people. All of those people also know a lot of people. If you’re following the math, this amounts to a whole lot of people.
(Lot of people) X (Lot more people) = Whole lot of people
See what I did there? Together, we’re able to reach a “Whole lot of people” (mathematically speaking). We’ve magically increased our chances meeting someone who is pregnant and is considering adoption as an option. So while we don’t recommend that you walk up to random pregnant strangers on the street and ask them “are you going to keep that?” we do want you to know that you are welcome and encouraged to talk about us behind our backs, and even share our strange, personal, and awkward situation if it makes sense. And if, on the off-chance you meet someone who is considering placing their child for adoption, please do share this site with them, and ask them to ignore the geeky, awkward post about math and blogging.
