Our Adoption Plan

We can't wait to bring our baby home!! This is probably how our dogs will feel about it, but they will definitely adore the baby! The short version of our adoption plan is that by January 1, 2020, our goal is to save and raise $5000 to get us started with the adoption process and get our home ready for the arrival of our blessing. For the next 6 months, we will work hard to bring in extra income, get our house ready to bring the baby home, and clear some extra room in our budget. After our home study is approved, we will apply for grants and hold fundraisers to raise the rest of funds. We are hoping to complete our adoption by the end of 2020. We will keep our friends and family updated on our journey and provide helpful info for anyone who might be considering adoption or is just curious about the process. Read on for details. :)

Christian Adoption Consultant
We have decided that we want to hire a Christian Adoption Consultant, Dawn Wright from http://www.christianadoptionconsultants.com/. One of Andrea's friends from her infertility support group (connecting with her is another amazing blessing that came out of our infertility journey!) hired Dawn to help her adopt her adorable baby girl and she couldn't say enough positive things about Dawn. We love the idea of hiring a Christian Adoption Consultant, first of all because it's a Christian organization, and also because they have developed relationships with adoption agencies all over the country that are ethical and won't try to scam you out of money. The agencies they work with will refund most of the fees you've paid if the birth mom decides to keep and parent her child.

Having a wide network of agencies gives them a much faster placement rate than the national average of 2 years. The organization's average time to place a child in adoptive parents' custody is 6 months from the time of the home study completion. Some adoptive parents are matched with a birth mother within days or weeks! Andrea's friend was matched within 3 weeks of her home study completion, and she took her baby home 3 months later! That's so encouraging!! We've already waited SO LONG for a baby that the thought of waiting 2+ years to bring home a baby seems excruciating!! This gives us so much hope!!

Another reason we want to hire Dawn is because the agencies her organization works with require that birth moms receive professional counseling/therapy before and after birth, which is not only good for the birth mom, but also leads to a much higher success rate (vs failed adoptions). We love that these agencies provide this level of care to birth moms. We cannot imagine how hard it would be to give up a child. Even knowing that you're doing it to give them a better life, it would still be super stressful, and we would need counseling if it were us!

Dawn and her husband Jason have adopted 9 children! Amazing! Here is the link to their story: http://www.christianadoptionconsultants.com/portfolio/dawn-jason-wright/. Dawn has helped other families with 120 adoptions over the last 5 years, so she has lots of experience and knows a lot about avoiding "red flags" or questionable situations which can help to protect our finances (and our emotions). She will also help us with filling out grant applications which increases the likelihood of being chosen for them, due to her extensive experience. Additionally, she will help us create a profile which introduces our family to birth parents and helps them choose a couple to adopt their child. You can imagine how important it is that our strengths as parents shine in this profile! Dawn will also pray with us, help us apply for situations, communicate with agencies, give guidance on adoption finalization, and answer our questions throughout the entire process. She has already answered several of our questions, and we haven't even hired her yet! It just makes us feel so at peace to know someone like her is helping people adopt!! There are SO many details. It is quite a complex process.

Here's some background on how this process works:

1. When we save up enough for the home study fee, we will fill out and gather lots of paperwork.
2. A social worker will complete our home study: a background check, interviews, financial review, physical exams, review of certified legal documents, and inspection of our home. This will likely take 1-2 months.
3. When we save up enough for Dawn's fee, we will sign a contract with her and talk with her about our plans.
4. We will create our profile, ask Dawn to review it and make suggestions, and we will print several copies of it.
5. Once our home study is complete, we will review "situations" (birth mothers placing a child for adoption) and apply for a situation that suits our family. The birth mother will receive a copy of our profile and may reach out and ask us questions.
6. If the birth mother chooses us (there could be multiple couples applying for the same situation), we are considered "matched with a birth mother." If she doesn't choose us, we can apply for another situation, and so forth. We could possibly have additional conversations with the birth mother and develop a plan for what happens after the birth of the baby.
7. Then we wait until the baby is born and travel there. We will meet the baby, but the birth parents have a certain amount of time (between 12 hours and 3 days depending on the state) to terminate their rights. In some cases, the adoptive parents are invited to be present at the ultrasound appointments and at the birth! It's not for every situation, but we think that would be so amazing!!
8. Then a social worker places the baby in our custody and we travel back home with the baby. 
9. Then we receive a few more social worker visits and wait until the court date for the adoption finalization hearing, which takes 3-12 months, depending on which state it's finalized in. 

Expected Costs
Andrea's support group friend spoke highly of Chrys Bitting, a social worker with Adoption Associates of Iowa, which is a nearby home study agency approved by Dawn's organization. Their home study fee is $1500. Dawn's fee is $3500, which we think is well worth it for all of the above reasons. These two expenses total the $5000 we're working towards to get started!

Once the baby is born and in our custody, the largest fee will be due to the adoption agency. This could range between $20,000-45,000, depending on the situation. Overall costs may include court and legal fees, pre-adoption and post-adoption counseling for birth parents, birth parent legal expenses, adoptive parent preparation and training, social work services needed to
match a child with a prospective family, interim care for a child, and post-placement supervision until the adoption is finalized. The birth mom's medical expenses are usually covered either under the birth mom's insurance, Medicaid, or under our insurance. The agency fee is known at the time we apply for a situation, so our budget amount will depend on how much funding we receive (grants, fundraising, etc). We will also have travel expenses related to picking up the baby and bringing them home, but these are far less if we adopt domestically rather than internationally, which factored into our decision to adopt domestically.

We expect our total adoption expense to be between $26,000-40,000, with a good chunk of it being covered by grant funding. There are over 80 grants we can apply for, which is awesome!! Also, Andrea's employer will give us $5000 reimbursement after the adoption is finalized, which will be so helpful! Another really great benefit to help us afford our adoption are the federal and Iowa state adoption tax credits. In the tax year 2019, the tax credits apply to adoption expenses up to $14,080 for federal and $2500 for state that we pay out of pocket but excludes any employer reimbursement and fundraising donations received. The earliest we would receive tax refunds for these credits would be when we file our 2020 taxes. I have more details, so just ask me if you're interested!

Stay tuned for our next post called Fundraising to hear about our fundraising plans!

Exciting Announcement!!

We have an exciting announcement to share...we decided to begin the process to adopt a baby!!!

As many of you know, we have struggled with infertility for the last 4 years. It's been the most heartbreaking experience we've ever endured, but some good has come out of it. Andrea has received so much support from her Christian infertility support group called Bearing Hope that she wanted to give others the care that she had received, so she agreed to take over leading the group for the last couple of years. She has been able to support women through the difficult journey of infertility and miscarriage, and even helped one woman find the doctor that helped her get pregnant! We have also grown stronger in our relationship with each other and with the Lord, and our faith has grown so much. This journey has reaffirmed for us that God always brings good things out of bad situations. Genesis 50:20 says "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving (or creating!) of many lives."

We have both always had a strong desire to grow our family. When we got married 5 years ago, we were led to pursue having a biological child, but we always said we would love to adopt a child if we're not able to conceive. God's calling in our lives sometimes looks different than we expect so we must step forward in faith believing that His plans for us are good, and even better than we could imagine. After much prayer and research about all of our options, we have decided to stop our infertility treatments and pursue domestic infant adoption! We are so excited!!

Why is adoption so exciting you might ask?

1. We love kids!! We love our kids, the kids in our families, our church family’s kids, our friends’ kids, and we sigh and smile at random cute babies in public. We totally adore all children and could easily love another's child as our own. Andrea has poured out her love to her stepkids since her stepdaughter H was 3, who is now almost 23, and she's been loving her stepsons for the last 6 years. Also, Scott and Andrea each have 2 adopted cousins, so both of our families are experienced at loving and accepting adopted children as our own. Andrea has loved teaching Sunday school to preschool aged children and helping with Vacation Bible School for the last 7 years, and everyone says the kids love her too! Scott is a baby whisperer. He picks up crying children and they fall asleep on his chest. We were made to love kids!!
2. There are so many children out there needing to feel loved and a family to belong to. We could provide a loving family with a mom, a dad, 3 older siblings, several grandparents, and lots of extended family members. We also have a safe and comfortable home, an awesomely supportive church family, and two of the cutest and sweetest border collie dogs who would all love them like crazy. How awesome is it that we could give all that to a child who may not otherwise have any of it!? We cannot wait to share with a child everything that we've been blessed with.
3. We have waited, prayed, cried and hoped for so long that we would have a child to nurture, love, support, and raise up to know the goodness of Jesus and to be a light in this hurting world. We have delighted in raising our kids: Andrea's stepdaughter H from a previous marriage (22) and Scott's sons M (16) and G (18), and now adoption gives us a chance to raise a baby together! It's a dream and a calling we've both shared ever since we each separately told God that we wanted whatever He wants for us, since He knows what's best for us better than we do, and He placed that desire on our hearts before we even met.
4. As Christians, it's our responsibility to care for orphans. James 1:27 says “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Not all of us are called to adopt, but we can support those who are called! What a great opportunity to live out our faith!
5. If we as Christians believe that life begins at conception and unborn babies should be treated the same as babies outside of the womb, then we need to step up and support the moms who choose life. We can do this by caring for a birth mom's child and supporting the birth mom's needs, like her medical and legal/adoption expenses, professional counseling, and prayer needs. Supporting a birth mom who is making this incredibly selfless, brave, and difficult choice would be such an honor!

One of the number one reasons a lot of people don't adopt is the extremely high cost, which includes birth mom support. Adoptions can cost anywhere from $20,000-50,000, depending on domestic vs international and depending on the adoption agency. I would guess that not many people have that much money just sitting in their bank accounts ready to spend. We sure don't! With such a large sum, we will be borrowing some of that amount, but we of course want to be fiscally responsible about it.  However, what's really exciting and what a lot of people don't know is there are several resources available to help people afford the high cost of adoption, including grants, tax credits, and amazing organizations that will help people raise money to help with the costs. We will talk about these resources and explain why adoption costs so much in future posts very soon!

We have been blessed with great jobs, and are capable of affording to raise a baby, but infertility treatments have greatly reduced our savings. We plan to apply for several grants, but we are also going to need some help from our friends and family with the costs. Never fear, we have a plan! Stay tuned!!