Dear Friends & Supporters,
We are beginning the process of domestic infant adoption and would love your support in this process. Since Chris was adopted (as an infant from India), we know firsthand the positive impact adoption can have on a child’s life, and have always had it in mind for part of our family building process. We persevered through the adventure that was getting married during the global pandemic and have been trying to start our family for the last couple of years. As we have navigated through infertility issues this past year, the conversation about adopting someday for a second kid shifted to the idea of building our family through adoption now. And since we have not been able to have a baby of our own, at this point in time we strongly desire the experience of raising an infant to experience all those early milestones with them.
If you know Deborah, you know she has always had a heart for kids. She can often be found making silly faces at and entertaining whatever child is in the room and has long dreamed of the day she would have a child of her own. If you know Chris, you know he has been elementary school teacher for almost a decade and is ready to upgrade from uncle status to dad.
It may surprise you that the average cost of domestic infant adoption in the United States can range from 50K to 80K. It certainly was a surprise to us! It is for this reason that we are asking our family, friends, faith community and supporters to consider donating to help ease the financial burden we never anticipated would be involved in building our family.
The fees which adoption agencies collect are so high because they cover:
You can play an integral part in helping us realize our dreams of becoming parents and enable us to provide a loving home for a child in need. We have chosen to use this specific crowdfunding platform so that any donations you choose to make are tax deductible. (You can also give to the foundation via check or charitable giving platform.)
Your love, support, and prayers mean more to us than you know.
Love,
Deborah & Chris
October 2024 Edit: The projected budget for our adoption is higher, since it is a California match, than we were initially prepared for. So we have raised the fundraising threshold.
Before we started this journey, I assumed the home study mostly involved a background check and social worker home visits. There have been so many other aspects!
Today we finished autobiographies we needed to write which will be followed with individual convos with the social worker. And we are listening to the 3rd of 4 education courses we need to complete.
Trying our best to keep things moving forward with work feeling very busy as Chris wraps up the school year.
Today we had our in-home visit with our home study social worker. We handed over a lot of paperwork (marriage certificate, financial information, vehicle information, etc.) and he checked that our apartment was safe (or that we know what needs to happen to make it safe) for a baby. Then he asked us questions about our relationship and desire to adopt. We will have two more conversations with him as part of the home study process, and those will be individual interviews. The other large pieces of the home study remaining are some courses we need to take and autobiographies we need to write. The hope is to complete all the elements of the home study by the end of May.
Today we met with one of the Adoption Specialists at American Adoptions. The Adoption Specialists serve as the advocates and guide for adoptive families throughout the adoption process. We went over our Adoption Planning Questionnaire with her and were happy to hear that our preferences should make us a good fit for many of the birth parent situations they usually see. She gave us some suggestions about areas where we might want to further reflect on our openness to make us a potential match for even more families as well as things that would be good to highlight in the profiles which will be shown to birth parents. We feel further affirmed in our choice of American Adoptions as our agency and Chris commented after our call that it's starting to feel real! While the average wait time for the agency is 9-12 months after you become an active family, we learned today that there are more situations than we thought where matches are made after the baby is born. These would be the situations where we get call and need to go immediately to whatever state the match is in, rather than where you have a chance to get to know the birth mom part way through the pregnancy and build a relationship beforehand. We have been targeting June/July as when we might go live, and after the meeting today that still holds true, but we are wrapping our heads around how much that means our lives could change very soon!
We are so thankful to have the support of all of YOU on this journey!
Today we submitted our Adoption Planning Questionnaire (APQ) to our agency. This is a series of questions that the agency uses to understand what potential birth families to show our profiles to once we "go live".
We also have been assigned to the social worker who will do our homestudy.
So the next few weeks will involve check in conversations with the agency to go over our APQ and with our social worker to know how to prep for our homestudy. There are documents we need to gather, autobiographies we need to write, and several other checklists of things to look over and prepare.
It’s been a busy few weeks! We did fingerprinting and the initial paperwork to kick off the home study process. We also are almost done with our adoption planning questionnaire which our agency will use to identify what birth families to show us to. We received some outside funds so we lowered the target goal on this page. And we have another matching grant so donations currently are being doubled once again!
We are so grateful for everyone who has been checking in on how we are doing and for the generosity and encouragement of our community!
