You know when you're in line for a roller coaster or something, and there are periods where you stand and stand and stand and the line doesn't budge an inch. Then all of a sudden, there's movement and everybody shuffles along moving several places up all at once! And its exciting, there's activity, visible progress! That is how I feel whenever I check our agency's "waiting families" page and see that a profile (or two, or three!) have been removed.
I know we aren't technically "in line", the people at the top who have waited the longest are not guaranteed to match any sooner than those at the end of the list, but you can't deny the odds are good. Those who have waited the longest have their profiles shown in the "first batch" provided to expectant moms. Families at the end of the list who have only been waiting a few months will only be shown if the expectant mom asks to see more profiles after the "first batch". This is all contingent upon any specific requests from the expectant mom about attributes she does or does not want in a family, of course. But it seems that, at our agency, most families are open to all races, all genders, and many of the drug exposure situations or difficult life situations. So most of the limitations of who gets shown is down to requests by the expectant mom.
All things being equal, the closer you are to the top of the list, the more often you profile might be shown. Obviously, you start in dead-last place as the newest "active, waiting family". Our agency has between 20 to 30 active families at any one time, on average. We hung out in the low-twenties positions on the list for a loooooong time, slowing creeping upward. After Christmas, it seemed like no one was matching. Nothing happened on the website for at least 2 months straight. I was getting nervous. Then, a week or so before our Spring quarterly meeting with the agency, two families came off the list. That started a trend and every few weeks, more and more families have come off the list! I was particularly happy for 2 families which I had seen on the website back in November 2014 when we were researching agencies. I was happy to see that even those with a long wait did eventually match. Even though these matches aren't related *directly* to M and I, it is still so joyful to see the progress and activity - keeps my hopes up, gives me something to cheer about. And as those families match, our match draws closer! We are now in the top ten, so hopefully our profile is in the "first batch" at least some of the time.
It's hard to not get excited! I'm trying to keep in mind we have not been active a whole year yet and who knows what expectant mothers are looking for. There are a lot of things I talked about in our profile that could be positives to one mom and negatives to another. We just need to keep praying that we are brought together with the mother that is right for us, so that we can develop a strong, lifelong relationship with her for the benefit of our (hers and ours) child.
It is pretty exciting though XD
