Keith and I were married on May 12, 2018 and adoption was something we discussed quickly following our wedding – actually a day after we got back from our honeymoon.
I still remember the day - We had gotten back from our honeymoon on Saturday evening and we attended service at our church that following Sunday morning. His Little Feet International Children's Choir, a worship choir composed of children from many different countries, was leading our service as a special guest. It was amazing watching all the children from differing countries come together and worship God with one voice. Throughout the program I could feel God moving. Then, one of the adult staffers got up and talked about Compassion International, which is a faith based sponsorship program. He spoke of being one of the children sponsored in his country through Compassion International and how receiving a sponsor changed his life. It was in that moment I felt God saying, "there's a child waiting for you." At that point I thought he just meant to sponsor – I never imagined it'd lead us to adoption.
After church Keith and I looked at one another and both said, "Let's sponsor a child." So we picked one of the many children from Compassion's table and giggled because we'd only been married a week but we already had a "child." A few minutes after we had selected our sponsored child we were heading home and talking about how "cool" the experience was with His Little Feet. As we both finished the conversation, we approached a stop sign and looked at one another and said, "I think we should adopt a child," and that's where it all began.
We have some wonderful friends who are from Ghana and we really felt our hearts being pulled towards adoption from Africa.
As part of our adoption process, we have started a crowdfunding campaign. It may surprise you to hear that adoption related costs can easily total up to $35,000 or more. This is why we have set a goal of $15,000 to help ease the financial burden that we have left to pay for our travel and expenses while in country. To finalize the adoption in country, we are required to stay in country for 12-16 weeks to finalize the paperwork and we have to hire a lawyer ($5,000 - $7,000 USD) to represent us through the paperwork in country. Those costs are not paid for in our fees that we've already paid so that will also be an additional expense.
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 grows up.
We are so grateful to have received a court date from the magistrate in Johannesburg! We will be officially adopting our little boy on July 28. The funny thing is, we started dating on July 28, 2014 -- and nine years later, we will be adding our beautiful little boy to our family.
We are so excited to have finally reached this step as we are coming up on 3 years of going through the adoption process. We are planning to travel sometime around July 15 and we are so excited to meet our boy!
We are still working to fund the rest of the money needed, the 12-16 week stay is coming quickly but we know God will provide. Thank you so much for your support. We could NOT do this without you all.
We are currently waiting on a court date so we can schedule travel to South Africa to get our sweet little boy. We were able to video chat him a few weeks back and hearing him say "hi mommy and daddy" melted our hearts. We are so excited to meet him and we cannot wait to finally introduce him to everyone who has prayed for us throughout this long three year process.
