Adoption Grants

Hey guys!
It's been awhile since we've posted an update! Just been busy researching adoption grants, picking the ones we want to apply for first, and gathering all the documentation we need. Here is our adoption binder where we keep all the paperwork. It's a lot! And we've only just begun!

We found a website that has a list of 80 different grants available to apply for! It's called http://fundyouradoption.tv/. They have free resources for people adopting, including a spreadsheet and advice about fundraising too! Plus we got some tips from our friend Kathryn who has adopted an adorable baby girl and guidance from our Christian Adoption Consultant, Dawn. Most of the grants were for international, special needs, or older or harder to place children, but we narrowed it down to our top 5 that we will apply for this week and a few more that we will apply for once we hear back from the first 5.

We were approved for an adoption loan (yay!) for the majority of the adoption agency fee, travel costs, and post-placement social worker visit costs, but we still need to raise between $10-15K in grants and fundraising. Nothing is guaranteed, and we can't register with agencies until we have all our funding in place, so we would appreciate your prayers through this!!

Adoption Update and Exciting News!!

Hey everyone! We hope you're all staying healthy and coping well with the changes that this pandemic has brought us. We have learned during this time that we are all going through something hard and we each have unique challenges. It's so heart-warming to hear how communities have come together to help each other out! Keep spreading kindness!!

Our family is all doing well. We have postponed our trivia night fundraiser that was scheduled on April 18th, due to social distancing guidelines, and we don't yet know the best day to reschedule it. We still plan to have it and will keep you all posted. It was extremely disappointing to have our journey put on hold since we didn't know how we would fund our adoption or when it will happen. We've already waited for so long for God to grant the desires of our hearts, so that's been one of our biggest challenges lately.

About a month ago, we were approached by a friend with a potential birth mom situation. After praying and considering it quite a bit, we decided it wasn't a good fit for us and the birth mom also decided to choose another couple. It was disappointing, but Scott and I had some valuable conversations and we had the opportunity to pray for that birth mom and show her kindness during an especially difficult time for her.

However, we serve a Big God and His plans can't be stopped! There are babies born every day that need adoptive parents. The need is still there, even when it seems like the rest of the world has stopped or slowed way down.

With that, we have some exciting news to brighten your day! God made a way for us to hire our adoption consultant!! We signed a contract with Dawn and Jason Wright from Christian Adoption Consultants last night!! We are officially ready to start applying for birth mom situations all over the US. Our journey to bring our baby home continues. Please continue to pray for us as we enter the next phase, which brings new challenges.

How did God do it, you may ask? Well, back in early February (before COVID started becoming widespread and social distancing), we contacted our mortgage company to see if we could refinance our mortgage for a lower rate, with the rates being at a record low. We were approved for a lower rate, which would save us money. Then, we waited and waited for them to process our new mortgage. The deal was finally closed at the beginning of April. We learned then that we would be able to skip 2 mortgage payments and would receive $500 back at closing! With those funds and the funds leftover from the garage sale after paying for the home study, plus some generous cash donations from a few sweet friends, we were able to hire our consultant!! Yay!!! Thank you so much for everyone's support to help us get this far!!

We still have a long way to go to fully fund our adoption agency fee, which will cost at least $35K, plus travel. We will be able to finance part of that, but we will need to apply for grants and continue fundraising at some point for the rest. This is another area that we will need a lot of faith and some prayers that the Lord would continue to make a way for us. We love you all!

Trivia Night Fundraiser!!

We are excited to announce that we are hosting a trivia night fundraiser to help fund our adoption!! It should be a really fun night for a great cause. It's one way for our friends and family be a part of welcoming a baby into our family! I've explained in previous blog posts here , here , and here that adoptions can be very costly, so we appreciate any help we can get!

I met with some wonderful friends over the weekend that have volunteered to help us plan the details and ensure we have a successful fundraiser. We are truly blessed!

It's official! We're a "Waiting Family!"

Hi everyone!
Just thought I'd drop an update on where we're at. We are officially considered a "Waiting Family" on Adoption Associates of Iowa's website (our home study agency)!! Our profile is now public! Here is the website (click on Scott & Andrea):

https://adoptionsiowa.com/waiting-families/

This means that birth moms all over the country can view our profile and contact our home study agency if they are interested in talking to us and considering us for adopting their child. The home study agency doesn't do any kind of advertising to find birth parents, like adoption agencies do (so it's much less expensive to adopt through their agency)--it's all word of mouth. Oftentimes, attorneys will refer birth moms to the agency, or birth moms who have worked with them for prior adoptions will contact them for another adoption.

It's customary for birth parents to consider multiple families at once, and we can choose whether or not the situation is a good fit for us, so this process could take a while. Chrys, our home study agency social worker, said to be prepared to wait 1-2 years (2 years is the national average) for a successful placement. We could be chosen as adoptive parents anytime between now and 2 years from now! It's exciting!!

We are also still planning to hire Dawn, a Christian Adoption Consultant, but we need to do some more fundraising. We still need about $1500 more. We have been analyzing our finances and have come up with some plans to help contribute to the high costs as well, but we're not quite ready yet. It's a process. As I've mentioned in other posts, the benefit of hiring an adoption consultant is that she can put us in touch with multiple adoption agencies all over the country and we can apply for situations that are the best fit for our family. This approach results in child placement within an average of 6 months. The consultant would also be looking out for our best interest and helping us watch for any red flags that may result in an unsuccessful adoption and cost us thousands of dollars (and lots of heartache). She can also help us find and apply for grants that will help us with the high adoption costs and ideas on fundraising. Her guidance and our peace of mind is well worth her fee. Again, here is some background about Dawn's vast experience with adoptions:
https://www.christianadoptionconsultants.com/portfolio/dawn-jason-wright/

We're Home Study Approved!!!

We are excited to announce that our adoption Home Study has been approved!! This is a big milestone!! Chrys sent the final draft of the home study report to us and to our Christian Adoption Consultant, Dawn, on Monday. Her words were "I have attached the finalized home study for this family.  They are a fabulous family and are ready to go!"

This means that we are now able to start the adoption process if a birth mother were to choose us to adopt her baby. I've created our adoption profile, which is a summary with pictures describing who we are and why we want to adopt, but we just need to finalize it. Once we're ready, it will be posted on the Adoption Associates of Iowa's website in the "Waiting Families" section. Expectant parents all over the country will be able to view our profile and consider us for adopting their baby. They could choose to meet with us and other hopeful adopting parents to make their choice. This could happen anytime between now and 1-2 years from now. Chrys told us to be prepared to wait. We will need some prayers for our nerves while we wait!

We still need about $1500 to hire Dawn so she can help us find birth mothers all over the country to apply to be matched with, which will speed up the process. We will use the adoption profile that we created for this process too. Dawn will also be available to answer our questions and help guide us through a complicated and emotional process, including applying for grants to help us afford the high costs of adoption. She has already been SO helpful and gracious to answer our many questions! Can't wait to be able to sign a contract with her!

We sincerely appreciate every prayer, every garage sale donation, every T-shirt bought, every dollar donated, and every minute spent helping us through this process from all of our loved ones. We could not keep going if it weren't for you. We love you!! And thanks for loving and welcoming our future peanut into our family.

2nd Home Study Visit and Next Steps

Happy New Year! Our 2nd and final home study visit was with our social worker Chrys Bitting on Dec 30th in Des Moines and it went great!! We spent four hours at a table at Panera Bread restaurant answering questions about our adoption preferences, our memories of growing up, our interests, our marriage, and how we plan to parent. Now, we are just waiting on Chrys to write our final report, which should come out this week. So far so good!! We are so grateful for all the prayers and well wishes!! It's been a busy and stressful past few months, but we're so relieved at how well the process is going.

To prepare for our 2nd visit, we had to get our FBI fingerprints taken for the background checks, decide on our preferences (number of children, ages, ethnicity, sex, etc), decide on guardians in case of emergency, gather life insurance amounts, retirement and savings account balances, divorce decrees, and our youngest boy's consent for his background check, since he's over 16. We also had to come up with a list of amenities our home town (and nearby cities) have to offer. As my list grew and grew, I got so excited thinking about all the fun things we will get to do with our future child! There really is so much to offer a child here. It gave us both a fresh dose of hope.

Update on Next Steps:

1. Create a profile (pictures and facts about our family) to post on Adoption Associates of Iowa's website for birth families to review and potentially choose us to talk to and/or adopt their child. Once we're home study approved, we will be ready and able to adopt!
2. Start applying for grants and continue fundraising to help with adoption costs:

• The remaining $1500 needed to hire our Christian Adoption Consultant, Dawn, to help connect us with adoption agencies all over the country and help us with applying for grants. 
• About $20,000-30,000 if we adopt through an agency in the US.
• $1050 (plus her travel cost) for at least 3 post-placement visits with Chrys our social worker (some states require more than 3 visits, so it could cost more). If we matched with a birth mom through Chrys, it would cost about $2000 plus our attorney's fees.
• At least $5000 for travel and hotel stay (if matched with a birth mom out of state). We will be required to stay at least 7-10 days in the state the baby is born while paperwork is completed so we can take baby home with us.