With grateful hearts, we have some news to share.
We are adopting.
We are thankful for this opportunity to grow our family by adopting a child from Ghana, Africa. We have spent the last 12 months doing paperwork, gathering documents, and preparing our home and our hearts to welcome a child into our family. We are 3/4 of the way through the process and are waiting for the final immigration process to be matched with a child.
Thank you for your thoughts and prayers for us and our child through this process. Any gift will be used for adoption fees, legal expenses, and travel expenses while we spend three months in Ghana. We are so grateful for any support that you can give us as we continue this journey to become a family of three.
How's the adoption going? Do you have your baby yet? How much longer? We have been getting those questions a lot. Truthfully, we have been asking ourselves the same questions too. Adding a child through adoption is different than pregnancy in a million ways, but most notable to us is the lack of a timeline. When we started this process in May of 2023, we did not imagine that we would still be in the waiting process at the start of 2025.
And in some ways, it sucks. We are at the mercy of other people's timing, and although we feel ready to be parents, and the nursery is ready for our little one, we are still a family of two.
On the other hand, it is in divine timing. Not only has 2025 marked the end of a challenging season in our lives, but it has also been a time of transition. Sam started a new job for the school district to start a new preschool classroom for children with autism. With that came many changes, but also so much joy! Growing Davis, our small business grew faster than we anticipated, which was a blessing. We picked up some new hobbies and worked on some long-term projects. We have gotten to see family and even go on a cruise to Canada!
So in the pain of waiting, there is also joy. In the waiting, there is impatience and trust in divine timing that knows the full picture and plan.
So how is the adoption going? It's a loaded question, but we usually say, "It's good. We are just waiting to match with our child."
This is a great question that we have been getting a lot. When we began the process in May of 2022, we spent a full month researching the adoption process and what route was best for our family. During that month, we investigated becoming foster parents, foster-to-adopt programs, snowflake adoption, domestic adoption, and international adoption. After talking to lots of social workers and program coordinators and taking lots of online seminars, we were led to select international adoption. Within international adoption, there are many different countries that Americans approved to adopt from. Each country has different requirements, such as the age of the parents, how long the parents have been married, religious affiliation, pre-existing health conditions if the parents spoke a certain language, and even the BMI of the prospective parents. When we looked at those factors, it narrowed it down quite a bit. With a handful of countries left, we prayed and discussed it, and somehow, we kept landing on the Ghana page. We really felt like God was leading us to our child.
Although it was a leap of faith to pursue adopting from Ghana and selecting an agency to help us on our journey, we are so thankful for the journey this far. Choosing to adopt from Ghana has its obstacles, like the long time we will have to be in the country, educating ourselves on the complexities of transracial adoption, and even the fact that the government in Ghana does all paperwork by hand, so the process can be slow. We know that in every obstacle, God is creating a path for our family. Knowing that he is working in the background is the best comfort we have in this journey that is full of uncertainties. In the waiting, that truth is what helps us smile.
We just heard from our social worker that their team in Ghana has received and reviewed our file. The wanted us to send them more pictures of our home, which was an easy fix! Even though it is something that made the process a little longer, we are hopeful that it means that our file is being reviewed and is almost ready for approval. Now we are back to waiting and praying.
She did it. While in this adoption process, Samantha has been working full time in her job as a teacher and has been a grad student. After three years, countless hard, long nights, Saturdays given up for homework, and the grace of God, Sam has graduated with her Masters inBirth-Kindergarten Interdisciplinary Studies of Education and Development with an emphasis in early childhood leadership and administration from the University of North Carolina- Greensboro. We are glad to have that chapter closed and to move on to the next chapter of parenthood.
Hello Everyone,
So we are expecting, sort of. James and I have had the immense blessing of adopting a child. Currently, we are about 3/4 of the way through the process. We are grateful for every single person who has loved, encouraged and prayed for us through this process. I wanted to give you a little glimpse of our journey so far.
1. Research—Last April, after we decided that we wanted to adopt, we started gathering information, attending webinars, speaking to adoptive families, and picking an agency. We selected Children Adoption Services, which operates out of North Carolina. Eventually through talks with the social workers there, we selected the country we are adopting from- Ghana, Africa.
2. Gathering paperwork- This step was a preparation step for our home study. It involved getting fingerprinted three times, getting three separate background checks, gathering financial statements, writing 15-page autobiographies, and hunting down our medical records.
3. Home Study- We began our homestudy in December. Our social worker visited our home four times and extensively interviewed us as people, and reviewed the safety and quality of our home.
4. Immigration- We had to begin filing the proper paperwork for not only US immigration for them to approve us as adoptive parents, but we also had to file paperwork to be approved in Ghana. This included more fingerprints and background checks. We filed these reports in February.
That brings us to the present. As of yesterday, 4/24/24, we received approval from US immigration to be adoptive parents. Yay! One step closer to meeting the child that God has set aside for us.
Now as with each stage, we enter another period of waiting. Although it is hard to wait, we are staying busy. Both of us are making preparations around our home for our new child. Samantha is working on her last semester of grad school and James is working on our small business DavisMysteryDice.
We are grateful for the prayers and support that people have given us through the process. We are sending much love to everyone.
James and Samantha
