Baby C's Timeline

I can't believe it's been over six months since we submitted our initial adoption application! Just this week India approved our adoption packet so I thought now would be a good time to write a little about what led us to international adoption and to post our adoption timeline.

We began looking into adoption as a real option to expand our family in the spring of 2015. We started our research by googling agencies and the different types of adoption. After contacting several agencies both locally and nationally, we chose to go with Adoption Avenues (AA) located in Portland, Oregon. They that seemed to genuinely care about the world's children which touched our hearts. The couple that started AA are two doctors that travel to poverty-stricken areas several times a year to help orphans in need. AA was also significantly cheaper than other agencies which allowed us to begin our adoption immediately.  After asking the adoption coordinator no less than one thousand questions, we wrote our first check and sent in our application.

Deciding on the type of adoption that would fit our family was far more difficult than choosing an agency. Initially, we wanted to foster-to-adopt a little one from our area, but we were told that finding a healthy girl under the age of 6 would be impossible unless we were willing to accept a sibling group. That was just a little more than our family was ready to take on. Next on our list was domestic adoption. We consulted with two local agencies for three whole months! During that time we ran into many roadblocks, some of the larger ones being educational classes not being offered when Jonathan was available to take them, and the possible expectation of "gifting" the birth mother. Our domestic agency informed us that nowadays many women prefer open adoption, so our file would have to be chosen from a portfolio of willing parents (which may be more difficult for us as we already had two biological children). We also were informed that Florida allows prospective adoptive parents to "gift" the mothers during the pregnancy and at birth and that some mothers may request this gift. The cost of the adoption and gifting (possibly exceeding $30,000) the mother, along with Jonathan unable to start classes until July 2016, left us looking for other options. After countless late nights and hundreds of prayers later, we were led to international adoption and INDIA! Well, here we are! We're hoping to share our adoption story with our friends and family as well as those considering adoption.

Keep us in your thoughts as we move forward, and please send love and peace to our daughter and all of the other 31 million orphans in India.

Baby C's Timeline:

September 27th, 2015: Application sent to Adoption Avenues to pursue a Honduran adoption
November 8th, 2015: Switched from Honduras to India
December 27th, 2015: Home Study visit
January 21st, 2016: Home Study approved
February 3rd, 2016: I-800a submitted to USCIS
February 11th, 2016: Received appointment date and location on for fingerprinting
February 19th, 2016: Registered in India on the CARA website
February 26th, 2016: Biometric Fingerprinting at USCIS in NOLA
March 29th, 2016: Received a request for evidence from from USCIS (to update home study)
April 6th, 2016: CARA Approval!
April 8th, 2016: Received new home study and mailed requested forms to USCIS
May 2nd, 2016: I-800a approval and we received a referral for a beautiful 10 month old girl in Hyderabad India!!!
May 4th, 2016: We requested to be officially matched with Baby D
May 7th, 2016: Received approval from CARA and Baby D's orphanage (Original documents requested)
June 20th, 2016: Original documents received from India
June 22nd, 2016: I-800 filed with USCIS, part 2 of dossier sent to off to be apostilled

Home Study Completion

We met our social worker last night to pick up our official, completed home study (HS) and sent off nearly all of our paperwork to Tallahassee, Frankfort, and Washington, D.C. to be apostilled for our dossier! Our HS took longer than we expected as we had to hire a traveling notary to accompany us to all of our doctors appointments, which as you can guess, was quite the ordeal. We are hoping to submit our packet to register on CARA within a few weeks!!! Then we will officially be on the waiting list and one step closer to being matched with our daughter!!! Can I put enough exclamation points after that sentence? :) We are hoping that everything comes back apostilled and we have no further hang-ups before we are registered in India.

We expanded our referral request to include a girl under the age of 3 at time of referral and added several special needs to the list such as cleft lip/cleft palate, minor orthopedic conditions, birth marks on visible parts of the body, and several other minor or correctable conditions.  

I am so happy we have made it this far and had no idea how emotional and in-depth this process would be. Knowing that we are bringing our daughter home at the end of this journey makes it worth every step.

Finding India

         As many of you already know, adoption has been heavy on our hearts this last year. It's something we have considered since getting married, and it has only become clearer that this is what we are meant to do. We have learned so incredibly much about the adoption process and we are hoping we can share this process with the ones we love (and those interested) through our adoption blog!

       When we began this process six months ago, we were overwhelmed. We had so many questions and finding the answers seemed impossible. Do we choose domestic or international adoption? What adoption agency do we use? Can we afford adoption? What country do we adopt from? How long is the adoption process? It took us months and months of reading government and adoption websites, adoption blogs, and forums dedicated to adoption, to find the answers to these many questions. After much thought and deliberation we have decided on an adoption agency, international adoption and....

....INDIA! For the last four months we thought that our baby girl would join our family from Honduras. As Jonathan speaks some Spanish, we thought that Honduras was the country we were being called to. BUT...After talking with our adoption agency, doing some in-depth reading, and seeing the statistics of orphans needing homes in India, we felt as though our hearts were in India.

Our Baby Girl...
We have filed our adoption application and have begun assembling our dossier and home study paperwork. Our hope is request a girl under the age of two at time of referral with a minor to moderate congenital heart defect. With my medical background, our great healthcare benefits, and the unmeasurable amount of love our family has to give, we know we will not be given more than we can handle. 

Thank you to everyone who has supported us this far on our journey. We are excited and humbled to see what the future hold for our family. Feel free to ask us any questions and we will share our journey with you as our adoption moves forward.