As some of our closest friends and family know already, we originally started the adoption process in 2017, but put our adoption plan on hold when we became pregnant with our third child, A.  Now that she’s older, we’re able to start the adoption process again!  We are so excited for this journey and can’t wait to welcome another boy or girl into our family.  This blog will outline our progress as the adoption process can take usually 2 or 3 years from start to finish.  This blog will also be honest, as you can read through our last posts (from 2018!), and we won’t sugarcoat the inevitably emotional roller coaster that is adoption. Children can be a handful, sometimes stressful, sometimes sleep-stealers, but they are also our greatest joy in life. Our children have brought so much love into our family and we know more children will only grow that love. We believe adoption will feel the same – sometimes overwhelmingly difficult, hard to understand, and testing us, our patience, and our faith at times, but we also believe it will be one of the most rewarding decisions of our life. We look forward to this new chapter and we are thankful for your support along the way.

For those who are just now starting to follow our adoption journey, we’ll quickly update you on how we arrived at where we are today. We’ve known for a while we wanted to have more children, however, we’ve experienced some dramatic premature births that put both Christine and baby at risk (Christine knows more than she’d like to about NICUs, ambulance births, antepartum stays, and weekly injections to say the least). So several years ago, we started to talk about adoption and all the kids out there that are in need of a home. We are a faith-filled family and know that God calls us to “take up the cause of the fatherless” (Isaiah 1:17). After meeting with our church deacon to discuss our desire for more children, considering our high risk pregnancies, and knowing there are so many orphans around the world, adoption felt like the right choice for us to grow our family.

Unfortunately, the adoption agency we originally started our process with in 2017, Bethany Christian Services, is no longer providing international adoption support. So, we are starting back at square one with a new adoption agency, Holt International. Since international adoption is also an ever-changing landscape and now that we have a larger family, we’ve had to reconsider which country programs fit best with our family given the differing eligibility requirements between countries. In the coming weeks we will continue to discuss with our adoption coordinator the programs in Thailand, the Philippines, and Colombia to figure out which country will work best for our family. We will likely be matched with a child between 2-6 years old based on which program we choose and they will likely have some level of special need. We will provide more information and specifics on our potential child once we sign on with a specific country program.

In the meantime, we are working on our first major paperwork hurdle, the home study. The home study requires us to work with a social worker to gather and complete a huge pile of certificates, verification documents, medical forms, references, interviews, and more, which can generally take 2-4 months. It’s been a labor of love and thankfully we are in the final stages of this first major step of the adoption process. We plan to have our home study completed in September, which is when we will officially sign on with a specific country program and move on to our next step: the dossier. Of course being in the midst of a pandemic adds a unique obstacle to compiling all of our paperwork while state departments and government offices may be closed or operating with limited staff, so we continue to pray for patience and hope we are able to complete our requirements without too much delay.

In addition to our home study preparation, we have also created an adoption video that countries often request to learn more about the adoptive family, to see their home, and to find out more about why they want to adopt. This video will be included in our application, along with our home study and dossier. Check it out below!

We’re excited to have you here catching up on our journey and hope you continue to follow and support us as we head down a long but rewarding path to bringing our new child home!