By the grace of God, we have been blessed with the opportunity to grow our family through adoption. We are pursuing a sibling group in Colombia and hope to bring them home soon. For several years, we have anticipated and prayed for this adoption. There have been many twists and turns, but we’re now making some tangible progress. There’s so much uncertainty with international adoption, but we’re so grateful to know that God is our provider. There’s no way we can do this without Him! Never in a million years would we have imagined adoption from Colombia and yet, God knew! For years, He has been preparing us for this moment; we are grateful and humbled to follow His will! We come to you, our family and friends, to join us on this journey.
This morning, our social worker called and let us know our Letter of Intention to adopt the twins was accepted today! While this does not guarantee our family's approval to adopt, this is the country acknowledging our intention to pursue them. Our dossier has also been filed with the country today and should be reviewed and approved in the coming weeks.
In times of uncertainty, finding comfort in God's trust is a true blessing. We believe that He is orchestrating a plan far beyond what we can see or imagine. We look forward to bringing the twins home and watching them grow and flourish alongside Eugene and Abraham. Today, we pray for peace as we trust God through every season, whether joyful or challenging. Our hope is that He will prepare their hearts for this significant transition. We are pursuing this with all our hearts and as swiftly as we can!
After a few unexpected and unfortunate delays, our dossier was finally shipped to Colombia last week! It's our next phase of "hurry up and wait" until they are able to review and approve our dossier. We are praying for a speedy review and approval (with no RFEs), which can take anywhere from 1-3 months to hear back.
We've should also hear back any day about our Letter of Intent! If all goes as we would like, we could get approval and an official "match" with the kids in a month or so. We are praying for a speedy review and approval from ICBF!
Our dossier has been submitted to our agency! In a few weeks, it should hopefully be reviewed by the committee in Colombia!
We were SHOCKED to receive our i800a approval (basically a pre application to immigration, our country-level clearance to adopt) in only 6 weeks, since the website estimated 4.5 months.
After a mad scramble to get our medicals updated, we packed up our lives in a little brown box and shipped it out to Birmingham, AL today!
If everything continues smoothly, we can receive approval from Colombia as early as 6 weeks from now. Timelines are varying greatly due to Colombia updating their requirements/process this year. We could potentially travel as early as November or as late as next Spring!
Praise the Lord for his faithfulness through this adoption!
So the day after our last update, we found out the children we had written the LOI for had been officially matched to be adopted by another family. This was a huge surprise to us and our agency, as they had been told these children’s files were not being reviewed by other families. We took some time to pray about next steps forward and urged our agency to share the files of children we had requested to review back in January. We completed an official file review for that sibling group and immediately said “yes” to the Lord’s calling! After speedily writing up a new LOI, we submitted it to our agency’s in-person team. After some quick edits and positive feedback from the in-person psychologist, it has officially been submitted to ICBF to review! We are now still waiting on our i800a to come back (we had our fingerprints done two weeks ago, so it can be any day now) so we can ship off our dossier to our agency! We are so excited to be moving forward and trusting the Lord with this adoption. There have been so many twists and turns along the way, but His Will is so evident in everything that has happened. Please continue to pray for a speedy i800a turnaround, positive LOI acceptance, and dossier approval!
God’s timing is nothing short of humbling, amazing, and inspiring. This adoption has been filled with mountains and valleys of our brightest, most hope-filled moments and some of our darkest, saddest days. Through it all, the Lord has shepherded us forward along His path for our adoption.
A couple of weeks ago, we were presented a file for a group of siblings amidst a very long wait for updated information on a different sibling group we had wanted to pursue. As soon as we ended the call with our social worker, Colton looked at me and said “So, God’s timing, and not ours, right?” We immediately knew in our hearts that we were going to pursue these three kiddos. After years of saying “yes” and then hearing many subsequent “nos”, this was the first time we truly felt like we were completely surrendering to the Lord and His will for us. This completely caught us by surprise, in the best way possible.
In response to that call, today we submitted a Letter of Intent to our adoption agency. The letter is basically describing our desire to adopt these children and how we will love, support, and care for them. Colombia can either reject or accept the letter. If it is accepted, it just means that Colombia acknowledges that a family is trying to adopt these children.
We humbly ask for your prayers right now! We still have 1,000,001 things to do, but right now we are taking this time to praise the Lord for His impeccable timing. Please pray as we are processing our paperwork with USCIS that it comes back closer to the 1 month mark, instead of the 4.5 month mark that is estimated online. Please pray for our LOI and that it may be accepted by Colombia and that we have a quicker timeline moving forward. Once an LOI is acknowledged, we only have a few months before the rest of our paperwork has to be submitted. Based on the vastly different adoption timelines lately, it could be anywhere between 6 months to 1 year before travel.
