Thank you all for coming to read our story. We are a family that loves Jesus and has a heart to build our family through adoption and are believers in open adoptions and loving on birth families as much as we can. We have felt so supported through James adoption process and through this one. Thank you all for loving on our family so much!
Where are we in the process?
This adoption process has been quite the journey. We started 3.5 years ago, by writing our sweet attorneys at Family Building to start the process. While most home study's are pretty quick (3-6 months) our's took about 1.5 years or more to be approved.
The first pause for our home study was I was in need of major surgery 3 years ago. Therefore the doctors would not sign off for our adoption, until the surgery had been completed & I was on the mend. I am grateful for this pause, since at the time we had no idea what the surgery entailed & the recovery process.
We then started back on the home study process only to found some black mold in our house that was causing me to be sick. This led to a year of construction on our house to make the house home study ready once again. Therefore we could not be approved until everything had been finished. Once we got our home study approved, that put us in the waiting period for the last couple of years.
We have now been home study approved for years and were in the waiting period for a while to get matched before CA state laws changed. Due to the change in CA state laws in private adoptions they re-routed most private adoptions to go to an agency. We were one of those families re-routed to an agency and starting over with the waiting period. Although it was discouraging at first, we truly feel like the Lord led us in His perfect timing to this path, so we are stepping out in faith in this step. We know there have been many hurdles in the past couple of years, but we hold close to our hope in Jesus and His timing of it all.
As of right now we are not on a wait list, we are waiting to sign the contract with Family Network Agency hopefully this month. We have an apt. on April 25th to see if we can sign. We can sign if we have raised the 15 k that is due to sign the contract. We are planning to ask them more about how much longer we can have to raise the funds and hope & pray there is still a spot on their list for us. After contract is signed the remaining expenses are due once matched. That can happen anywhere from 1-2 years from now most likely. We of course are hoping for sooner, but trusting again in the Lords timing.
We are excited to say we hit 6k from the market fundraiser and my mini photography shoots (I own a photography business) combined we did this past couple of weeks, so have left 9 k for the first goal and 32 k for the second goal. For those that gave in the form of coming to our market and our mini sessions we are so grateful. The reason we used venmo for the market was because legally if you are selling goods there cannot be a tax ride off from it, therefore we needed to go that route. This is the next route we are choosing to step in faith because we love that this organization is all about adoptions and having family/friends rally & help us get a grant.
Why start this adoption fundraiser?
Before these last two weeks we have tried to not fundraise for this adoption. We paid for the home study and all the renewals on our own, as well as some of the attorney fees early on. After the change in state laws, we felt the support of friends/family encouraging us to once again be humbled and ask for support. It does not go un-noticed that our community has come alongside us time and time again from adoption support to getting me to the heart clinic 10 years ago. Thank you for your prayers, love and constant encouragement. Everyday we feel so much gratitude. Seeing God show up time and time again has truly grown our faith and hope so much.
What is the breakdown of costs?
We get asked this question a lot as for what is required cost wise in the adoption process. Although it can be a hurdle at times, we are so grateful to pay those that work hard at their jobs to help us in our adoption journey. We also want to support/love on our child's birth family as much as possible. We see all these costs as supporting our full family, our child's birth family included.
Orientation, Pre-Adopt Meeting- $350
Membership Fee, due upon signing- $15,000
Extraordinary expenses- $1,500
Birth Mother expenses- $5,000
Home study- $3,000
Attorney Fees- $5,500- $10,000
Adoption Social Worker fees - $6,025
Post placement and finalization fees- $2,750
Other expenses- Counseling, waivers etc. - looks like 500-thousands, things that come up.
How does this work? We raise funds through family & family's donating. Then once we have reached an amount we need to use for the adoption we apply for a grant from Adopt Together and they review why we need it (we send in our agency's costs and needs) and they then pay our agency directly in the form of a grant. We love it because it goes directly to the agency and this is a tax ride off for anyone who is donating as well.
Thank you for taking the time to read our story and a little bit about this journey for us. We love you all!
We are so thankful for this update we get to give you. 2.5 weeks ago we got a call for a sweet baby boy. Our lives changed overnight and we are so grateful. We are not going to share a lot of the details, but have been home for 2 weeks and adjusting to life with two sweet kids. We have a long road ahead in the adoption process until it is finalized. It happened all within one week of signing with our new agency so we had no time to fundraise. Thankfully our local bank let us take out a line of credit, that we hope to pay off via grants, fundraising and saving more of our work income in the coming months. We took a big step in faith this past two weeks and we have already seen the joy that yes has given us. The lessons we are learning our endless with faith, trust in the Lord and all of His goodness for those who lean on Him. We are leaning on God in this season and saying thank you everyday.
There are so many God moments in this journey. I can share these in person, but it has blown us away that God is in all the details, always.
Thank you all! We feel deeply thankful we have already had such help. From here on out we ask for a lot of prayer and if you can share this page on a private page we would love the support!
Other ways to help:
https://www.babylist.com/registry/home
https://www.mealtrain.com/trains/3vz2rl
If you know of anyone with extra breastmilk we are also looking to have enough for a couple more months to give him a little daily. (We still are doing formula when needed too)
Thank you to Kiara, Jesse & Bella who put on a garage sale/coffee cart fundraiser for our family. They raised a total of 610 dollars and we are more than grateful!
We are now 2k away from being able to sign on and be on a waiting list and 27 k away from being fully funded for the adoption costs.
For next steps we are looking into grants, which we needed to be signed on for to apply to. Please be in prayer they will consider us. We are self employed so it makes it a little tricky.
We would love prayer around the timing of the adoption, a healthy baby (if that is the Lord's will) & for wisdom on what fundraisers to do next. In all honesty we are tired, but know God will provide strength for us to get through our jobs, raising JW & put on more events.
Fundraisers in the future:
- Mini shoots on August 16 for our adoption at the river.
- In addition, we are going to host a movie night fundraiser, hopefully in September. We need to work out date, time and place. If anyone has ideas on things we could do to generate more money at the movie night we are open to any ideas!
-We are praying about offering doc. edits to past clients as a way to serve them well & put most of it towards our adoption. If everyone said yes we would have our adoption almost fully funded. We are praying for the right timing & hoping the Lord put it on our hearts for a reason. Please be in prayer as we will hopefully send that email out mid August.
Thank you all for praying & following our journey thus far, it has been a long road, but this week we have seen a lot of things speed up. We are praying that it means God is opening the way for us to sign the contract soon to be on a waitlist once again and ultimately bring a child into our family soon.
This week we had multiple churches donate to our adoption equally 3,000 dollars combined. We feel very grateful & humbled by this process. We are praying about the next steps with the bigger goal coming right after & what the Lord wants us to do in the meantime. That means we are roughly 2,500 dollars away from signing the contract and 27,500 from our ultimate goal of 40k.
We are hopeful, trusting & praying about how the remainder of the funds that God turns our fishes and loaves & multiplies it. We are looking into different ways to earn it, apply for a grant and fundraise some more. If you have any ideas on grants or fundraising we would love to know!
Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.
The words you are loved, have really been on our hearts after this past weekend. We were surrounded by people from our childhood, different churches we have attended & our family. It was a beautiful gathering of people worshipping together & praying over our family.
We were able to raise 2,000 more dollars!!!
We feel very grateful and even though we have a ways to go, we feel so very loved & full of hope.
Our next goal is to ask friends/family to share this page as well as start a Etsy shop to sell items to raise money for our adoption.
Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts!
Thank you all for the support, prayers and encouragement in this process so far. We are forever grateful.
As of right now, we have done mini sessions & a creative market, plus saved some money of our own to raise 7,000 dollars. We need 15,000 before we can sign the contract for the agency and be on a wait list. The agency let us know they recommend having most of the 40,000 saved when we sign as it could be any day we get a call for a placement. We are taking this wisdom and praying for the Lord's provision.
We are trusting that the Lord knows the timing and even though it is hard to not even be on a wait list right now, we are trusting He will provide. We are holding a benefit concert this weekend & have other fundraising ideas for the future as well. Thank you for all your help!
We would love your prayers for this journey as we have had to jump through many different hurdles for this adoption to go through already. We also would love if you can share our story on social media. This is very humbling for us to ask this, but we are forever grateful.
