With grateful hearts, we have some news to share.
We are adopting.
We are thankful for this opportunity to grow our family by adopting a child from Ghana, Africa. We have spent the last 12 months doing paperwork, gathering documents, and preparing our home and our hearts to welcome a child into our family. We are 3/4 of the way through the process and are waiting for the final immigration process to be matched with a child.
Thank you for your thoughts and prayers for us and our child through this process. Any gift will be used for adoption fees, legal expenses, and travel expenses while we spend three months in Ghana. We are so grateful for any support that you can give us as we continue this journey to become a family of three.
Hello Everyone,
So we are expecting, sort of. James and I have had the immense blessing of adopting a child. Currently, we are about 3/4 of the way through the process. We are grateful for every single person who has loved, encouraged and prayed for us through this process. I wanted to give you a little glimpse of our journey so far.
1. Research—Last April, after we decided that we wanted to adopt, we started gathering information, attending webinars, speaking to adoptive families, and picking an agency. We selected Children Adoption Services, which operates out of North Carolina. Eventually through talks with the social workers there, we selected the country we are adopting from- Ghana, Africa.
2. Gathering paperwork- This step was a preparation step for our home study. It involved getting fingerprinted three times, getting three separate background checks, gathering financial statements, writing 15-page autobiographies, and hunting down our medical records.
3. Home Study- We began our homestudy in December. Our social worker visited our home four times and extensively interviewed us as people, and reviewed the safety and quality of our home.
4. Immigration- We had to begin filing the proper paperwork for not only US immigration for them to approve us as adoptive parents, but we also had to file paperwork to be approved in Ghana. This included more fingerprints and background checks. We filed these reports in February.
That brings us to the present. As of yesterday, 4/24/24, we received approval from US immigration to be adoptive parents. Yay! One step closer to meeting the child that God has set aside for us.
Now as with each stage, we enter another period of waiting. Although it is hard to wait, we are staying busy. Both of us are making preparations around our home for our new child. Samantha is working on her last semester of grad school and James is working on our small business DavisMysteryDice.
We are grateful for the prayers and support that people have given us through the process. We are sending much love to everyone.
James and Samantha
