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.