We're adopting!
2019 brought some unexpected changes for our family with me leaving the workforce and now being home with our kids. As we reflected on how God has moved in our lives and shown us His goodness over and over, it became clear we were being called to open our home and our hearts to let the natural overflow of His goodness pour into a child He had chosen for us long before we knew this was the plan. After extensive research, we have decided that an international adoption from Colombia is the pathway we should be pursuing.
While we don't know yet exactly what this journey is going to look like or how long it will take, we are beyond excited and are doing everything we can to be prepared to expand our family through adoption. It's likely our son or daughter has already been born, and we look forward to getting matched & bringing them home! As part of our adoption process, we have started a crowdfunding campaign for some of the early costs. It may surprise you that adoption related costs can easily total up to $35,000 or more. We started saving before we started the process and do plan to fund a large part of the adoption expenses ourselves. However, we do need some help covering a portion of those costs.
These donations are tax-deductible & will go a long way in helping us. Thank you so much for taking the time to consider this. Please feel free to reach out directly to Aaron or myself for more details. I hope to share plenty of updates as we move forward. It will likely be a long road, but our son or daughter is waiting for us there at the end so we couldn't be more excited. We hope that by inviting you into this process, you will see yourself as part of the community we hope to build around our child as he/she grows up.
We began discussing adoption mid-2019. We contracted with our adoption agency in December 2019. Here we are in July 2022 and we can finally say we have entered the official waiting period for Colombia adoption. Yikes! Can you believe we haven't even been "officially" waiting this whole time?!
Our timeline has been longer than average and we aren't sure why. We submitted our paperwork to Colombia back in April 2021 and just received word we were registered on June 24. That's a long time!
But now we are included in the list of families that Colombia picks from when they have a child in need of a home. We can thank God and feel some sense of affirmation in the process.
To be honest, these past few weeks we have seriously considered dropping out of the Colombia program & looking into other adoption options. Our process has been even more drawn out and messy than the norm (so we have learned based on our interactions with our online community of fellow Colombia adoption families) and we were starting to doubt this is what we should be doing. So the news today came as a good boost to morale & reinvigoration for our mission to see this through until our son or daughter is home with us.
God is faithful & we want to be faithful as well.
Thanks again for all your support and prayers. We still can't quite see the light at the end of the tunnel but at least we have confirmation the train is still moving!
