We are excited to share that we are adopting! We are doing everything possible to be prepared to welcome a baby into our lives and become first time parents. It may be surprising to hear that adoption costs around 50,000 or more- and the payments are due immediately in large lump sums, making it difficult for many to pursue this path to parenthood. This is why we have chosen to start a crowdfunding campaign to ease the financial burden that is overwhelming to adoptive parents. We invite you into this process alongside us and hope that you will see yourself as part of the community we wish to build for our child. We have been in the adoption process for 2 years and have had one failed adoption. However, we have remained hopeful that our time will come and we are ready to become parents in 2023. We hope you will become part of our community and share in our love and joy when we become parents!
Our daughter was born on February 28, 2023 and placed in our arms the next day by her incredible birth mother! We took official placement of her yesterday and we can’t wait to bring her home to NYC! While we’ve already been here for a week, it could be another 1-2 weeks before we are cleared to go home- meaning weeks of hotel and rental car fees, and airfare home at the last minute. When we get home we will have monthly post placement visits for the next year totaling several thousand dollars as well. Please continue to share our fundraiser with anyone who may be able to help us out as we finish the process of bringing our girl home and starting our new lives as a family of 3!
After our failed adoption we went home, hired some additional adoption professionals, and went back to waiting. In fall 2022 we were matched with an expecting mom in Louisiana! We had an amazing team to work with during this time, and last week we received a call from mom that baby girl was here and she was ready for us to meet her! We flew the next morning and went directly to the hospital to meet baby girl!
After our paperwork was complete and our profile book ready to go, we started networking to find a match with an expecting mother. When we started our search in January 2021, we were taking the self-matching route, meaning we did not have any agency or consultants marketing on our behalf. We created several social media sites dedicated to our search and asked friends and family to share, and created accounts on adoption matching apps for potential birth mothers to find our profile. A few days after our pages went live we were approached by a woman who turned out to be a very infamous adoption scammer using fake ultrasounds and stolen social media photos. This was figured out very quickly by our attorneys but just goes to show how prevalent scamming can be in the adoption world and how it can take a financial and emotional toll! Following this we had no progress for several months until we matched through social media in June 2021. Baby girl was due at the end of July 2021, and we supported mom financially during these two months in addition to paying her legal fees. We traveled from NYC to Arizona to be present for the birth of the baby, but after delivery she decided to parent her child. We went back to NYC alone to start our search again.
To be continued….
When covid prevented us from going on our honeymoon, we spent summer of 2020 doing the paperwork and legal items necessary to begin the adoption process. We retained an amazing lawyer here in New York with whom we have maintained a wonderful relationship! Her team helped us obtain background checks, recommendation letters, medical reports, and more so that we could begin our home study. For a home study, a social worker completes a several hour in depth interview with us and visits our home to determine if we are qualified to become adoptive parents. In addition they suggest many educational opportunities for us to learn about best ethical practices for adopting a child and continuing lifelong learning about the process. We became home study approved and New York State certified for the first time in December of 2020. We created a profile book with information about our lives and our desire to become parents through adoption. We were now ready to begin searching for a match with an expecting mom who wanted to make an adoption plan.
To be continued…
