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.