Hi Friends & Family! We are excited to share that we are planning to adopt an infant! We’ve been excited about the possibility of adopting since we were married four years ago but assumed we’d start our family biologically and consider adoption later on.
Back in March of 2020, Anna’s health took a difficult turn, and her auto-immune condition flared, causing us to have to reconsider how we might start our family. With the medicines and our goal of seeing Anna well, we realized we needed to think about another option.
Anna and I have partnered with several agencies in order to give us the best shot at being placed with a child, but we are now in the waiting stage.
While we wait, we are working to try and offset some of the significant costs that adoption includes. We’ve set up a goal of raising $15,000 to help us start our family. We’d be grateful if you’d consider donating anything at all to help offset the significant costs of adoption, including birth-mother care & counseling, travel to the birth state, agency fees, lawyer fees and finalization costs. All in, this could be anywhere from $30-$60k.
From this point on, it could be 2 months or 2 years until we match with a birth mom, and we are excited to share the story with you as it unfolds. Thank you for your encouragement and love as we navigate this complicated process.
All our love, The Lassiters
We realized this morning that it has been WAY too long since we updated you on our adoption story! Last December was a whirlwind of emotion as we were introduced to a couple through a mutual friend that was hoping to make an adoption plan. We had the opportunity to meet the couple in person and decide together to move forward with a private adoption! Our daughter, Zoey, was born on January 9, 2023 in Atlanta! Since the adoption was within Georgia we were able to take her home from the hospital (we didn't need to observe the laws around interstate adoptions). She is a beautiful, healthy baby and we are humbled and overjoyed to call her ours.
We know that without your counsel and financial support this story could have been very different. We were able to cover most of the adoption and legal fees through your generous gifts and are incredibly grateful to you for helping us start our family. There is no greater gift we could imagine than to give someone the opportunity to parent. Thank you a million times over.
All our love,
Anna and Jonathan
Hi friends,
Over the last couple weeks, we have been asked about the process of adoption and what "waiting" really means. It can be complicated when you haven't experienced it and I thought it would be helpful to explain further.
There are a lot of ways to adopt. There is international and domestic, private and state adoptions, child age, and multiple models of how you engage with an adoption agency. We chose to adopt an infant, domestically. An infant means we would parent our adopted child within a week of his/her birth.
The most common type of adoption that we were familiar with before starting this process was using a single adoption agency. However, we chose to use an Adoption Consultant. The difference is that in the consultant model, you have the opportunity to connect with multiple agencies at once - typically between 5-8 agencies total. This means our name is on five lists, rather than one. It can speed up the process because it casts a wider net.
We started connecting with agencies a couple months ago and are now "live" with five agencies. We are aiming to be live with eight. Live means that we are on the agency's list of waiting families and if they meet a birth mom whose criteria matches ours, the agency would let us know. That doesn't mean we are matched with a child, it only means that we can ask the agency to give the birth mom our profile book and consider us. (This is called presenting to the birth mom.) Our profile book is a combo of pictures, stories, and commitments that we have made to the birth mom, were we to be chosen by her.
The birth mom usually has a week to look over the profile books and decide if we (or another family) match what she is looking for. If we are chosen, we receive a second call telling us we are matched! Most adoptive parents present to multiple birth moms before they match. It can be a quick process to match, but in most cases it takes a minimum of 6 months for a birth mom and family to match.
A birth mom can partner with an agency at any point during her pregnancy. This means we could match with a birth mom in her second trimester, or on day of delivery. The agencies we are working with right now are in Florida, Tennessee, and Utah. When the birth mom signs the final paperwork making us the adoptive parents, we will most likely need to stay in the birth state for 1-2 weeks before the child can cross state lines.
I hope this summary helps answer some questions//reduce the mystery of what our adoption will look like. Thank you so much for your love and support during this time!
Best,
Anna and Jonathan
