After a short wait, they got the call to adopt

THE PARENTS: Jacki Piha, 30, and Matt Piha, 30, of Middletown, Del.

THE CHILD: Finley Keith Jackson Piha, 10 months, adopted Dec. 19, 2022

AN EARLY CHALLENGE: Feeding Finley during the baby-formula shortage of spring 2022; they Googled and called stores frantically, trying to score cases of the stuff.

They’d been dating for only a few months when they ran into Matt’s aunt in a shopping mall. “Oh, is this your girlfriend?” she asked.

Matt hesitated. “Uh, no, this is Jacki.” And the look Jacki shot him in return was a signal: It’s time for The Talk.

A few hours later, he showed up at her apartment with flowers. “That’s when I knew: We have to figure this out,” he says. “And we did. We figured it out that night.”

Initially, Jacki was the more reluctant of the two, wary of dating a man who was still in college when she’d already graduated and was living on her own in Philadelphia. But a friend talked her into returning to her alma mater, the University of Delaware, for homecoming in 2014.

“She told me we had a place to stay; it turned out to be this really grungy college house. One of the five guys who lived there was Matt.” Jacki was drawn to his gregariousness and charisma. “I tend to be a more timid, laid-back person. I needed that light in the room; that’s what he was for me.”

To Matt, Jacki was living the grown-up, post-college life: a job at the Franklin Institute, an apartment with a view of Lincoln Financial Field. After graduating and living with his parents for a few months, he moved in with Jacki — toting a large flat-screen TV, two bins of clothing, and a toothbrush.

The next milestone was an apartment they rented together. Then a dog, a pit mix rescue named Clio, adopted on Valentine’s Day 2017. Later that year, Jacki got a job in development and alumni relations at the University of Delaware, and they relocated.

Matt, who had shifted careers from hospitality to elementary education — he’s a physical education teacher — was thrilled to return to his home state. Later that year, he proposed a trip to Disney World, with an engagement ring secreted in his suitcase.

Once at the Magic Kingdom, he insisted on bringing a drawstring bag with an extra pair of socks — in case his feet got soaked on Splash Mountain, he told Jacki — and rolled the ring into the fabric.

“I proposed in front of Cinderella’s Castle, cliche and corny as that is,” he says. “When we came home, I remember sitting in the airport, and Jacki and her mom were on the phone, already talking about wedding plans.”

They married at the Franklin Institute, Jacki’s former workplace, in March 2019. Much of the night was a blur, Jacki says, but she’ll never forget the few moments she and Matt had alone, after the ceremony, on the building’s rooftop, with champagne and pizza and a sweeping view of the city.

Both wanted to be parents. “We got to a point where we were doing things together and would say, ‘It would be awesome to do this with a kid,’ ” Jacki says. She is adopted, an experience she describes as entirely positive — she has a good relationship with her birth family as well as her adoptive parents — but hoped to conceive a baby biologically.

After a year of trying and months of exhaustive testing, she learned that she had endometriosis and adenomyosis, when the uterine lining tissue grows into that organ’s muscular wall.

They tried IUIs. They tried IVF — a cycle that produced one viable embryo and a failed transfer, and another round that produced no healthy embryos at all. “We thought: This is our sign,” Jacki says. “Let’s stop putting my body through this. Let’s heal ourselves. I felt a huge sense of relief once we decided to go with adoption.”

They chose Open Arms Adoption Network because of the agency’s focus on birth parents’ well-being. And they blazed through the preparations — Matt checking off the tax documents and clearances, with Jacki taking charge of their profile photo book. They were approved to adopt less than six months after their first call to Open Arms.

“We were expecting to wait a while, maybe a year,” Jacki says. But it was 10 days later — they were lolling in bed on a Sunday morning — when they got an email from the agency: “Hey, do you guys have time to meet tomorrow?”

There was a baby, a boy born on May 10 in Pennsylvania; the birth parents had chosen Matt and Jacki. “They said, ‘Do you want to go through with this?’ We said, ‘Of course,’ ” Matt recalls.

The next morning, Jacki woke up feeling miserable and tested positive for COVID-19. She spent her 10-day isolation on the couch, ordering baby items from Amazon. Meantime, their son remained in a NICU — he was born seven weeks early — and the couple met his birth mom via Zoom.

“We were trying not to get our hopes up,” Jacki says, “but after that meeting, it felt good.”

They met Finley for the first time in a Bala Cynwyd park, with the baby’s birth parents and two social workers. “It didn’t feel real until she placed him in my arms and I ugly-cried,” Jacki says. Matt remembers, “I was scared to hold him. I just stood there; for once I was speechless.”

Once home, the middle-of-the-night feedings were rough on Jacki. “I would wake up grumpy and annoyed, and that was terrible,” she says. And Matt found himself drenched with sweat, enough to warrant a shower, every time he bottle-fed the baby.

But Finley was a tranquil infant, sleeping through the night at three months. “It’s not as easy to have alone-time now,” Matt says. “But I think those two years of infertility brought us together. We went through such a hard time that anything else feels easy.”

Finley will always know about his adoption, Jacki says. “It will be part of his life, just as it was for me. We were meant to be a family in this way.”