We have some BIG news!
We’re hoping to adopt a sibling group from the Phillipines! We are both excited and nervous for what this process will look like as we know it will involve lots of highs and lows. We are trusting that the Lord will equip us to face whatever lies ahead. Our hope is that we will be able to raise a portion of our adoption fees by utilizing the tax deductible site Adopt Together. We know that each of you have your own financially responsibilities and we recognize and respect that. Our heart is not to make anyone feel obligated or pressured to give in any way. We simply want to invite you to walk alongside us in this journey if it happens to work for you and your family. We believe that it is important for us to be upfront with each of you in regards to how and why we plan to fundraise for our adoption. Our adoption from the Philippines will cost us a minimum of $26,000 for one child and goes up by at least $8,000 for each additional child (not including travel costs). We are personally open to adopting a sibling group of 2-3 kids. Our application has already been approved and our contract has been signed. The next step in our process will involve us paying $7,000 by the end of March. Once we’ve sent the first payment over, we will move into the home study phase of our adoption. We want to reassure you that we as a family are going to be financially invested in this adoption as this is a choice we are making. We want you to know that we will be committing to making sound decisions and finding places in our budget to cut back on in order to cover as much of our adoption as possible. With that said, we also believe it’s important that we are able to find a balance for our three boys to continue living life and make memories with them as we wait to bring our adopted children home. Not only do we appreciate whatever financial gift you are able to give but we greatly welcome your prayers as this will be another transition for our blended family and the kids we welcome into our home. We are so incredibly thankful for the people God has placed in our lives and we hope that by inviting you into this process that you will see yourselves as a part of the community we hope to build around our children as they grow up. Thank you!
It is with SO much excitement that we can finally announce that our home study has been APPROVED! You guys, this has been one of the longest processes and we know there is more to come but this feels like one of the BIGGEST hurdles is COMPLETED and guess what...it was approved MUCH earlier than we thought! We were thinking it would be end of August beginning of September so I (Ashley) was in tears (of joy) when we got the approval email because it was so unexpected and a much needed blessing and encouragement to us! So what's next?? We are waiting to hear back from our adoption agency but we need to knock out 10 more trainings prior to being able to officially accept and approval and travel (we will be starting the training courses today as we can some food for winter haha!) we also need to complete our Dossier paperwork which includes waiting for some reference letters to arrive from those of you who so graciously offered to do that for us, getting a few documents notarized and getting some pictures of us as a family together. We will also be able to begin applying for grants at this time as well. We are hoping we can begin the process of looking at profiles of the sibling groups soon. I will post as soon as we get in touch with our agency and know more. We wanted to just get an update out to you today and celebrate the goodness of God together! Thank you for choosing to support us! We wouldn't be here without you! We truly mean that!
Our prayer requests at this time would be the following:
1. Prayers for endurance to get the final paperwork for Dossier completed in the next week
2. Prayer we can continue to raise support as September we will be paying a large chunk of the adoption funds to cover our Dossier portion of the process.
3. That we would be able to qualify for some grants to help cover addition costs
4. For protection from the enemy and that we would be grounded in truth. We seem to experience more attacks as we get closer to bringing our kids home. Thanks for walking this journey with us! We love you all and are blessed to do life with you!
Hi sweet Friends and Family,
I wanted to hop on and give you an update on our home study process. As of today, we have submitted ALMOST ALL of our home study paperwork to our home study agency and it feels SOOOOOO good! That was a huge hurdle in and of itself and to say that I am relieved to have that portion behind us is an understatement :) Our kids have been such good sports and we are so thankful for how gracious they have been with us in getting stuff done as well. Gavin even woke up early on Good Friday (a day off of school for him) and had such a positive attitude when we went to the Anoka County Courthouse to get our fingerprints done last week. Since he will be 18 in August and will be living with us 50% of the time through his Senior year, the agencies have to treat him as an adult which is why he had to have fingerprints as well. As of today, the only final paperwork items we need to have turned in to our agency are our Psychological Evaluations for Fred and myself which is scheduled to take place on June 6th as well as some of our reference letters for the home study. Phew! We made it through paperwork round 1! I chatted with our social worker today and you guys she is FABULOUS! I have been nervous about the home study, but she right off the bat said, "Please don't stress about it. It is going to be great!" She encouraged me to tell the kids not to stress either. It was just such a great, encouraging conversation and I am looking forward to working with. We are scheduled to do our orientation as well as our home safety check and interviews with us on Tuesday, May 10th. This will be a two hour process. After that, we will have a better idea if we have 2 or 3 more meetings left with our social worker. The good news is that I had a little time to breath between last week and this week and I feel more refreshed. It has been so much coordinating and typing (To give you a little background they had Fred and I each fill out 74 questions on how we were raised, our family life, etc and mine ended up being 33 pages in length and Fred's was 20 pages in length.) We were just given the green light to start working on our Dossier now. This is the portfolio we have to put together for the Filipino government. It feels almost like we are putting together another "home study" portfolio but not quite as intense. The home study process meets the United States requirements for adoption and the Dossier meets the Filipino government's requirements for adoption. Some of the items will overlap which is nice, but other items we will need to mail in the originals/hard copies etc. Our home study should be completed in the next 2-3 months and our Dossier packet has to be completed no later than September 23, 2022. I am hoping that we can have most of it done well in advance of that date :) We are moving along at a great pace the agency said.
So with that, here are some things we could use prayer for:
1. That our psych evaluation in June goes well and that we wouldn't be anxious for it. (We've been told it is totally normal to feel anxious but still we'd appreciate it.)
2. Praise for almost being half way to our $14,000 goal on facebook! Yes, on this site our goal is over $22k, but our first benchmark was $14,000 on we're so grateful!
3. With that, continued prayer that financial support would continue to pour in. As we have shared before, we know the adoption will cost around $50,000 but this doesn't include the travel costs or the costs of beds, clothes, medical expenses etc. that the kiddos will need when they get home. To be clear we are NOT looking for financial donations to cover beds, clothes, or medical expenses, but we just wanted to share that while on paper it appears to be $50,000 in actuality it is much more than that. Especially if the kiddos need an immediate surgery or something once they arrive home. So we are trusting that God is going to continue to show up in BIG ways in this area :)
Thank you to ALL of you who have given so generously and prayed for us! We feel your support and encouragement and on days when the Enemy wishes to discourage us, we receive reminders from so many of you telling us to KEEP GOING. Please keep that coming. We couldn't do this without you!
We have been given the green light to start our home study paperwork!!! Yay!! While we thought we had a lot of paperwork to complete before, we just found out that this is wayyyyy more intense! It’s a full-time job to do paperwork for adoption 😂 That is what we will be focusing on this chilly/snowy April weekend. We want to thank each of you for continuing to pray for us during this process. We appreciate it more than you know. Our prayer request for this week would be for perseverance and patience. There is a lot to complete in a two week period so that we can get started meeting with our social worker. Second, we need to work with a psychologist to have psych evals done as part of our home study. The Philippines has a lot requirements that we need to meet in this regard and we’re praying that the psychologist we reached out to will be able to fit us in as his schedule is full. (There are not many psychologist in MN who meet the requirements so we’re praying and trusting that this will work out). Thank you so much for all your generous donations once again! We couldn’t do this without this beautiful community that we’ve been blessed with.
Friends and family we have a new update! Our home study agency has accepted our application! They just need our adoption agency to sign off on it and then we move into setting up our 3-4 home study visits with a social worker. We’ve been told this process takes about 3-4 months. We chose to go through America World Adoption Agency which is a Christian organization for our home study. This agency currently doesn’t have a waitlist for us to get started so we are waiting for the papers to be finalized and we’re ready to move forward with our next steps. We have been told that our home study, our 18 hours of adoption training (we have 4 hours completed so far), and our Dossier (our portfolio for the Philippine government) must all be completed by September. This is when the next large portion of our adoption fees will be due as well. We are enjoying this training program better than the last agency we worked with, because of the one on one video responses and encouragement we have received from our trainer. She is WONDERFUL! The classes are breaking down the process for us as well as challenging us to focus on our WHY are we adopting. It is teaching us to LET GO of our expectations for what adoption will look like. We have actually learned that often the day the kiddos arrive home with us can often be the WORST day of their lives. Yes, they have been waiting for a loving family to take them in and yes they want to be nurtured, cared for and safe, but they also are experiencing extreme grief and loss of the only home they’ve ever known, their country/culture and their caregivers. This is a lot for us to process mentally and emotionally. It may not be the Perfect homecoming we imagine and it will be a lot to process when we bring them home. However, the devotional we were encouraged to go through (Tandem) is SO hope filled. If God has placed it on our hearts to adopt and we WANT to adopt we WILL adopt! We just have to KEEP going! Our training so far has mentioned that yes it will be challenging but it will be worth it! These kiddos CAN and will heal!! They will THRIVE! So our two prayer requests right now would be this, can you pray for perseverance? Pray that we can keep going EVEN when the enemy tries to derail our progress? Even when we face doubts about whether or not we are capable of doing this? Even if we feel discouraged financially? Will you please pray that we keep GOING? Second, we would like to ask for prayer as we try a new church that has many adoptive and foster care families. We want to find a support group of people who have been through or who are navigating these things currently. We long to be connected with a church community that will also walk alongside us as we pursue this calling on our life. We also want to let you know that EACH of you matters in our adoption journey! We cannot do this without you. God has placed you in our lives and community for a reason and we are beyond grateful for the financial gifts, the encouraging words and the commitment to help support us in bringing these kids home and raising them. We are so grateful! Thank you for walking with us. 💜
Our contract with All God’s Children has officially been signed and our contract payment has been made! Our next steps are to tackle our first round of online trainings (18 hours-there is a second round of trainings later on in the process). We have chosen our home study agency and have a phone call with our Philippine advisor through All God’s children on Monday, March 28th to learn more about what the home study process will look like. From what we’ve been told, there is currently not a waiting list to start the homestudy process so we will be starting to knock out these trainings one by one so we can move into the home study process as soon as possible. If you are interested in praying for us, could you please just ask for peace throughout the process and reassurance as we pursue what lies ahead? Please pray for the hearts of all of us but also the hearts of the kiddos we will be adopting. That they would sense God’s presence and love and that they would be reminded that they are chosen and worthy. Thank you for walking with us on this journey.
