God’s Gift From India

It has been a long time since we last updated you all on our adoption process, but quite honestly there hasn’t been much to update on until recently. However, we have some exciting news to share… our home study is officially complete! The home study process required a lot of paperwork, expenses, medical appointments and social worker visits so it is a huge relief to be done with this step of the process! While our home study took much longer than we had hoped, we trust that this adoption process is in God’s sovereign hands and His timing is perfect. Once again, we are so thankful to those who prayed for us over the last 6 months as well as those who gave financially to help us with the cost of our home study! Your prayers, encouragement and financial support mean more to us than you will ever know! So what’s next? We have sent copies of our home study along with other needed documents to both the U.S. government and India’s government and we are waiting to receive approvals ...

December has been a crazy and exciting month! At the beginning of this month we filled out a packet of starter paperwork and mailed a check for our first two big adoption fees. Since then we’ve been working on renewing our passports, getting some “pre-home study” paperwork together, fundraising and filling out the applications for two home study grants that would help offset some of the costs of that portion of adoption.  We want to share some huge PRAISES from this last month... 1) We’ve sold ALL 500 pieces of our puzzle... that’s SO amazing! A huge thank you to all who gave! We’ve been so blessed by people who gave to buy 1 piece all the way up to 150 pieces! Every donation we’ve gotten is a reminder of what an awesome community of family and friends we have... this has been so encouraging to us and we appreciate each one of you! (The picture above is the puzzle completed... the back is filled with names of those who gave) 2) We finished and mailed in our starter paper...

We have some exciting news… we are almost 1/4 th of the way to having our puzzle completed!!! (See the picture at the bottom of this post) That is so exciting for us because that means we are even closer to having our home study fully funded! THANK YOU SO MUCH to those who have given online or in person! What a blessing it has been for our family to read your sweet words of encouragement, to hear that you are praying for us, and to know that your support is getting us a little closer to having our little one home! The cool thing about being closer to having our home study portion funded is that once our home study is complete we are one big step closer to being matched with a child! Also, most adoption grants require a completed home study to apply… so once our home study is finished we can apply for a lot of different grants that will hopefully help with adoption costs as well! We still have about 390 pieces of our puzzle that need to be “bought” before it is comple...

Since we have announced that we are adopting, it has been awesome to hear from so many family and friends who have committed to praying for us as we begin this journey! What a gift it is to know that that our family, this process, and our sweet little one are being covered in prayer! To those praying for us we want to say THANK YOU! This is the greatest need we have as we eagerly anticipate welcoming another child into our family! Some of our family and friends have asked how else they can support us as we begin this process. Aside from your prayer support, we are also fundraising to cover some of the costs of our adoption. To be honest, adoption is expensive... and the big numbers we see on our fee sheet can be a bit intimidating! Throughout our adoption process we will pay for things like agency fees, a home study, background checks, fingerprinting, psychological evaluations, adoption training/education, visas, passports, flights.... and the list goes on. All of these expens...

We’re fairly early in the process of adopting but we’ve already been asked… why are you choosing to adopt? And why India? Those aren’t bad questions – people are genuinely curious. So we thought we would share a bit of the journey that led us to adoption. Adoption was something Brady and I both desired to do even before we were married! We had many conversations when we were dating about what our family might one day look like and the children we prayed God would bless us with. Both of us had personal experiences with orphans on mission trips we had taken and we knew that adoption was something we wanted for our family. Before Ezra (our oldest son) was even born we researched adoption from Kyrgyzstan very seriously. For a variety of reasons we didn’t adopt at that time, but it left us with an even greater passion to pursue adoption in the near future. Fast forward a few years to May 2018 and now with 2 little boys at home, we had a conversation about starting the adoption pr...