One year

One year 

Today officially marks one year since we started our journey of adoption. This year was all paperwork and waiting lists. We go in to year two with such high hopes that someone will fall in love with us. The reality is--we are already in love with a child that may or may not exist yet. Our year journey recap --in one post.

November 19th - handed in registration form. The waiting list was expected to be about 4-6 months. We had to wait 4-6 months to find out if we would be approved to even hand in an application. (We started at #31 on the list)

February 24th– Our first blog post- announcing that we were going to (if accepted) grow our family through adoption.

April 1st –We were accepted to apply for the Domestic Infant Adoption program!

April 12th- Attended the two day required education courses

May 5th- Handed in our application

June 3rd – First part of our home study

June 13th- Home Visit- Second part of the home study- completed

June 18th- Officially approved to welcome a child into our home!!

June 18th- We were officially put on the waiting list for the “waiting family book” (We started at #11) They estimated about a 4 month waiting list. They informed us we wouldn't be notified again until we were number 5 on the waiting list. We expected to not hear anything until October.

August 14th- We got notification we were number 5 on the waiting list! Wowza –less than a month and we dropped to number 5.. That is a good sign. Time to get our profile ready!! They were now going to notify us every time we dropped on the list. We were waiting to hear that we were number 4.

September 8th- we received the written home study in the mail. (It takes them a while to write it)

September 12th- #2! We were number two on the waiting list!? What happened to 4th or 3rd? Not complaining

September 26th – Notification we were number 1! We were next to be put in the book.

September 26th –We were live on Parentprofiles.com (Completely separate from the waiting family book)

October 10th- We were invited into the family profile book aka- waiting family book!

November 9th- Our profile was completed and in the mail

November 12th- Our agency received our profile in the mail

November 17th 2013-Our profile was officially placed in the waiting family book.

Don't forget---It is adoption awareness month! <3

AT LAST--OUR ADOPTION PROFILE IS FINISHED!!

Our Adoption Profile is finished at last!! 

After WEEKS of hard work and stress trying to get everything to be EXACTLY how we wanted it- it is finally here:) 

We would like to thank everyone that helped us by proof reading, giving us insight, and different perspectives!!! Here are some (not all) of the people that helped: Pam Spar, Greg Spar, Jessica Kamps, Katie Meltzer, Jennifer Grotte, and our adoption counselor Dianne Delaney.

To those of you that follow our blog and not our facebook page (facebook.com/jordanandkaylahadopt) I forgot to mention that a couple weeks ago we did officially get our invitation into the family profile book. :) 

I am printing and mailing our six copies tomorrow and we officially get to start waiting ...very patiently for someone spectacular to find us. 

Hopeful future parents ----Jordan and Kaylah

Adoption Scams/failed matches

Adoption Scams / Failed (?) matches

A lot of you have noticed that we haven't updated our blog for a while. Aside from life getting busy it has been mainly because of some things/people we have encountered. 

In the last update we informed everyone that we were live on parentprofiles.com - and boy did that expose us as an adoptive couple. It's great, don't get me wrong. Being on here and going through what we are going through is normal when adopting, so don't think it is parentprofiles fault. It is really just the journey of adoption. 

Within our first week of being on the site (this is the site we pay for separate and has nothing to do with our agency) we were contacted by one scammer [[which was caught right away]], two real potential expecting parents, and another scammer [[caught after a long conversation]]. I am not afraid of privacy issues for scammers- so here is the first contact email:

Red flags:

1. The phrase "put to birth."
2. We got an email with the same name 2 hours later saying "..since I and David had decided..." (it was Neville originally)
3. Typos like "willin!g." There was a weird exclamation point in the middle of the second email's sentences , too.
4. Parent Profiles allows adoptive couples to communicate and give "scam alerts"--we looked up Whitney's       name and there were about 10 scam alerts on her.

I know a lot of people want to know about the real potential expecting parents that we were in contact with - but for their privacy I really feel we shouldn't give out much information--we can however tell you how we were feeling.

When we were contacted by "R" we got really excited. We were thinking, "Could this be real already?" Is this the start to our story?" Every email or text message we got was so exciting. We were very careful from the beginning not wanting to make "R" feel stressed or pressured in anyway. "R" is due in a couple months and is having a baby boy. Eventually our conversation died off - we are unsure of what she has chosen- and we pray that whatever decision she has or will make is the best one for her and her little one. After the conversation died off -our hearts were broken. It is our fault really- for letting ourselves get too excited too fast.

We were contacted by "S" shortly after conversations died off with "R". We guarded our heart more on this one. We were still completely open, but just held back our excitement. "S" was pretty open with us in telling us that she was on edge on whether she was going to chose adoption. Ultimately after a couple weeks of talking we are unsure of her decision. She knows we are here if she needs us- to talk or meet. We are giving her -her space -and we have a small feeling she has not chosen adoption. This is completely okay with us! We ultimately want the person or family that chooses us to know they are making the right decision for themselves and their little one. It will make our relationship stronger:)

We really know that when the time comes and it happens that it was truly meant to be. We know we are on this journey for a reason. There is a little one that we are meant to be with and an expecting parent that we are meant to meet. Until that day we will wait as patiently as we can!

All this has had us procrastinating on our adoption profile for our agency's family profile book. We have the first three pages just how we want them --but for some reason that last page we were having trouble with. Our adoption counselor had some minor changes on our rough draft, and once we went through it another time we made some major changes ourselves!

We did finish the second rough draft today and are about to send it in for a second review!

Our deadline to have it completed and sent in is Nov 21st! We are hoping to have it in by the end of next week! We will see about that though:)

Thank you friends/family/strangers for all your support!

Until next time,
Jordan and Kaylah------patiently waiting family

Parent Profiles---We're Live! Oh and #1!!

We're live on Parentprofiles.com

We finally got all of our paperwork filled out and sent into parentprofiles.com. This is completely separate from our agency's Waiting Family Book. Our profile is now up live and running! We will now be exposed to expecting parents that are looking into adoption online:)

See our profile here: 

http://www.parentprofiles.com/profiles/db29385.html

Waiting Family Book #1!!!!!

We received the email today stating that we are now next in line for the Waiting Family Profile book for our agency! We plan to get our profile completed in the next week or two! 

Well that's all for now:)

--Yours truly ---Kaylah and Jordan 

2nd!

Today we received and unexpected email from our adoption agency! We dropped, not to 4th in line, but to 2nd! WHATTTT???? 

We have been procrastinating on  making our profile, thinking we were still waiting to be 4th, and now we realized that we can't procrastinate anymore! Soon we may receive the email inviting us into the family profile book and we have to be ready!

Does anyone know of any good scrap-booking software we could purchase or download to make our profile? We found the creative memories story book creator, however creative memories is out of business now, so purchasing it makes us a little nervous!

So if everyone hasn't noticed I am a sucker for adoption-related jewelry! I forgot to post the picture of the necklace my best friend got me a couple months back! It is soo cute!  I am in love with it! 

I also finally got my bracelet in the mail that I ordered a couple weeks ago and I LOVE IT! 

That's all! ----We are hoping the next post will be announcing us entering the book!:---) 

Nursery

Greetings! 

The last two weekends we managed to complete a lot of the nursery! We have been saying for months that we wanted to paint the trim in our house white, but we wanted to test a room first to make sure it wouldn't chip or look cheap. We finally decided it would be perfect to test it in the nursery! We sanded, primed and painted all of our trim/doors white and painted the walls gray! We had to be neutral since we are unsure if our little addition will be a boy or a girl! We figured we would buy more gender color items once we know for sure:-) We love the way it turned out! 

We still have a couple finishing touches: chandelier, area rug, curtains, and toys of course!

Here are some ideas we came up with: 

Chandelier possibility

Rug possibility

Rug possibility #2

Here is some pictures of our prep: 

trim primer

First coat of paint

Our mess!

Putting everything together

Future Daddy putting the crib together

Our pup enjoying being an only child while it lasts

We did get our completed home study in the mail, and we are just waiting on a written statement from our adoption counselor to get our profile on parentprofiles.com ( an alternative site waiting families pay to go on to in addition to their agency waiting family profile book). Our counselor hopes to have it complete by the end of this week!

In addition we spent the weekend with Jordan's family attending the Little Falls, MN Craft Fair. Missy (Jordan's mom) ,Joselyn (Jordan's youngest sister) , Penny (Jordan's moms cousin) and myself (Kaylah) went to the fair and spent hours walking around in 90+ degree weather! It was soo HOT, but there were so many cute items we found for the nursery! Also we had a couple friends/ family members that allowed us to put out our adoption cards and little posters regarding us adopting! We can't thank them enough for being so supportive! See the display Amber, Linda and Tera did for us with their Papparazi Jewelry stand: 

Here are some things we bought and things we want to buy in the future:

Kaylah's mom always read her the book called " Love you forever" by Munsch/McGraw when she was a little girl. Recently, Pam ( Kaylah's mom) made a recordable version of this book for Kaylah so she will always have it for herself and her future kids. We had to buy this when we saw it: 

We are going to have a wall of different sayings like these

The song Kaylah's grandpa sang all the time

We bought this one with the saying  " i love you to the moon and back" Jordan bought Kaylah one of these ornaments when they first started dating <3.

This was a gift to us from Jordan's mom- She bought it at the craft fair for us: It's perfect! 

This vendor had such unique items! We took her card so we could get this done for our future children!



That is all for now!! What do you think?

Active August!!

Thoughts, adoption cards ordered, written home study received, more pictures edited! 

Thoughts--

We can't help but search and read others adoption stories, it gives us hope that our day will come. It also makes us day dream about the day we get the "call" that an expecting parent (or parents) would like to meet us, and boy do we want to meet them! We have been watching the families at our agency get chosen and see their status go from "Waiting Family" to "Pending Placement" and we get chills every time! We anxiously await the phone call that changes our lives forever. Will it be a call from our adoption worker, will it be a call from an expecting parent directly, is the child already born, being born or still growing in their mommy's tummy?  Does the mom want to be part of our lives just as much as we want her to be a part of ours? 

We would say we can't wait until our story has a happy ending, but what we really can't wait for is until our story has a happy beginning. 

We ordered our adoption cards last weekend and we should be receiving them in the mail on the 28th! 

Here is a picture of the front and back:)

Front of Adoption Card

Back of Adoption Card

Our adoption worker sent us our completed home study rough draft yesterday! We have some minor revisions needed and then we should receive the finalized one so we can get our profile up on parentprofiles.com  :--)

Here are some other pictures we took for our profile!  

This one I thought was hilarious!! Obviously we aren't using it but it really wants to make someone pick us doesn't it!! HAHAH

Small Update

#5

Hello Everyone! We figured we should give a quick update. Last we knew we were number 11 on the waiting list and we wouldn't get notification until we reached number five. WELL... After 1.5 months we reached #5!!  This means six families have been placed in the last month and a half, that sounds promising to us:) After we enter the book, we then have the opportunity to have our profile seen by all the expecting parents that go through our agency :)

This notification kicked us into high gears! We have to start preparing our profile so when we get the invitation to enter the book we are ready. 

We took some photos to put on our profile and make our adoption business cards with. We will probably only use one or two of them on the actual profile itself and the rest will go on our website! Thank you too Kaylah's mom (future grandma) for taking them! 

We have also been patiently waiting for our adoption worker to finish our written home study so we can put our profile up on parentprofiles.com. We received half of it today to review, and it is looking great! She hopes to have it complete this Friday so we can make our edits and send it back !:)


Thanks for listening!

Kaylah and Jordan

Paper Pregnant!!

Finally we can announce we are officially PAPER PREGNANT! 

If anyone knows where i can get this necklace PLEASE TELL ME

We have been home study approved and we are now able to have a child join our home whenever we are found and chosen. This can happen quickly or slowly. Who wants to take a guess how many months we will be paper pregnant before we get chosen? 7? 9? 12? 18? 

We wanted to wait to take some pictures and make a cute announcement but let's face it, we have been waiting for 8 months and that is long enough!  Oh....we will still take pictures so beware ..

Our next steps: 

Throughout the next couple weeks we are going to be preparing all of our outreach materials. Some of these items include: 

• Photo shoot: we will be trying to come up with creative photos that will make us stick out as a couple for our profile photo.
• Business cards with our information on them: we will be handing these out to family, friends, strangers and more! We will be asking everyone to pass them on! I know it sounds crazy, but almost half of the adoptions last year through our adoption agency were through creative outreach techniques.
• Youtube video: My mom has taught herself how to make creative videos for weddings and other major family events. We will be working closely with her to come up with one that represents us as a couple.
• Jewelry: something our family can wear everyday which will cause someone to ask why they wear it. Maybe a unique bracelet or necklace?

Although we will be doing a LOT of outreach ourselves we still put our names on the waiting list for the family book! There are currently 10 families in front of us. The profile book has a list of 60 families that expectant parents look through when they are trying to find a waiting family. 

So far no morning sickness, but the paper cuts are terrible!!

Home Study Completed!!

Sorry for the delay in getting more information up! We've been so busy since the last post that we haven't been able to get a good update up.

This week we finally completed our home study! 

We spent a couple of hours with our adoption counselor last week getting to know her and helping her get to know us better. It was interesting telling essentially our whole life stories in such a short time, but it was actually pretty comfortable and it helped to better understand ourselves as a couple and help her know who we are and what we're all about.

Yesterday our adoption counselor came out to our house and spent a couple more hours finishing with learning about us and touring our home. Over the two-week period we discussed so many topics about our lives including:

- What our immediate and extended families are like
- What it was like growing up
- How we met, fell in love, and got married!
- Our personalities (including strengths, weaknesses, hobbies and interests, and lots more)
- Our values, morals, and beliefs
- What we expect from the adoption process
- How we plan to incorporate aspects of our child's culture into our lives
- Our thoughts about open adoption
-Our support system and how they feel about adoption

And many, many more topics. We really like our adoption counselor and had a great time getting to know each other. It sounds like sometime next week, she will be presenting our family to the agency for a decision about whether or not they'll accept us into the program, but she told us not to worry. We know the challenges that face us in the adoption process, but we're excited to meet them head on and overcome them together as a family.

We're so excited and anxious to officially enter the waiting family group and start getting the word out that we are officially a "waiting family".

The next week or two we will be preparing our materials that will help us get the word out that we are looking for our little one (and possibly some more extended family).

We should hear early next week if we were officially accepted!

Until then, thanks to everyone for your love and support!

Let the Journey Begin

It's been awhile since we've been able to post an update with any major progress about what's been going on with our adoption journey. We now have more exciting news to share with everyone since mid-April when we finished our Pre-Adoption education program and outreach training!

• Our background checks came back! Usually this takes 4-6 weeks or more to complete, but ours only took one week!
• We completed our giant stack of paperwork necessary to complete the application and got it all submitted.
• We've officially signed up for the home study to take place!

So, what's this all mean? The home study process usually takes a two to three months and involves the adoption agency sending us an assigned adoption councilor to better get to know us through interviews and visits at our home. This way they can ensure we have represented ourselves accurately and make sure that our home is a safe, secure, and supportive one for our future child!

We're even farther in the process now and are extremely excited to get through with the home study and prepare for the next steps in the process. In the meantime, we'll be putting our outreach training to good use and determining how best we can reach out to let people know about us and how excited we are to adopt a child of our own. Hopefully with hard work and determination, we'll be able to find our perfect match as we wait to get into the family book! It can't happen soon enough!

Training and Outreach

Let's be honest.. Who is ever excited to go to training? I WAS! We met some great people and learned so much in the last two days. 

Yesterday was our adoption education training. We went in depth of the feelings of all parties involved in the adoption process: birth parents, child, and adoptive parents. We even had two families that had finished their adoption process within the last two years come and speak to us about their journey. We had a lot of questions answered. Both of these families' adoption plans are pretty open. One child gets to see her birth mother once a month and is even in her birth mother's wedding as a flower girl! 

We hope one day we will have that great relationship with our child's birth mother!

Our beloved name tags! There is a story behind these... 

On both days we got to know the other families in the training with us. It was so nice to meet people that are going through the same adventures as us! We all actually have each other's contact information and hope to keep in touch to watch each other go through the journey of growing their family through adoption.

This is us with Matt and Beth, our table mates! 

We had to fight to keep these name tags! Yesterday our educators had told us to leave them  for today's training and  we were crushed to find out that they had thrown them away! Matt had them reprint them for keepsakes!

Today was our outreach training. Waiting families reach out to their friends/community/professional lives and ask them to spread the word that they are in search of an expecting couple and child to embrace through open adoption. We enjoyed learning about the unique ideas some families used to find their expecting couple. One family found their match by wearing t-shirts to the state fair stating "Hopeful Adoptive Parent."

These were some examples of outreach families had done!

We have so many ideas for outreach and we are so excited to get started! Just think, 

you may be the one that finds us the greatest gift of our lives! 

No procrastination!

So we are a week into working on our application and we have accomplished SOO much.
No procrastination in this household! Our huge stack of paperwork is down to only two items!

 WOOOHOOOO

 This week we both had our physicals, had our fingerprints taken, notarized documents, and filled out endless amounts of papers. We are turning in our background check paperwork tomorrow, which unless our identities were stolen we have zero worries about. The background study check takes about 8-10 weeks by itself.

Here is our completed stack of paperwork:

Our next step is the adoption education training and outreach workshop - a 2 day event - which the only openings they had were in June. God must want us to be ready for our future expecting mother a little earlier, though, because we just got notification that a spot opened in the April 11th and 12th training:)

So while we are working on the application we are also working on our adoption online training which is required to be completed before the in person training. We have 3 of the 5 completed so far!

Things are falling perfectly into place right now, which makes us know we are down the right path.

How are we feeling?

We are feeling EXCITED, scared, HOPEFUL, worried, nervous etc.

We are beyond happy to be heading down this path, but on the other end we are extremely nervous. How are we going to explain in an online profile why an expecting mom should choose us to raise her child? We can only express so much in words. We just hope and pray we can write the right story and paint the right picture for our child to find us. Also, how do we express gratitude to the selfless expecting mother? We know what is meant to be, will be. <3333333333333333

XOXO future mommy and daddy!

And the Journey Begins!!

Today has been a super day! We have been impatiently waiting for April 1st to find out where we were on the registration hold list. We assumed our registration wouldn't be considered until May.

We were a bit worried about our registration for two reasons: 

1. Our age--They had a minimum age requirement of 25 and we are both under 25

2. Fertility Treatments- We had to disclose that we were going through fertility treatments and we were worried that would be looked at badly. 

We did talk to the social worker that was there when we turned in our registration and she stated that exceptions are made based off of income, stability, maturity, etc. We were praying they would look past our age. 

Well GUESS WHAT!! They made the exception and today they ACCEPTED us into the Domestic Infant Adoption Program!!!! We just received the application, and let's say we have a lot of work ahead of us, which in the end will be so worth it that we will forget all about it! :) 

Next Steps:

1. Complete the Application Checklist (I'll give us 2 weeks)  Includes: Income Check, Background Check, Physical, Medical records, reference letters,  documents (birth cert, marriage cert etc), photographs! ( I already have half of this completed haha!)

2. Hand in Application

3. Complete the Education Seminars

4. Complete the Home Study 

5. Enter Family Profile Book

6. Wait for the perfect mother to find us! 

This becomes more real every day! :)

What is meant to be will be!:) 

We can not wait for the day we bring our child home<33

 for he or she will be blessed with double the love

Update

Last week we received an email with updated numbers for March! We are now officially in the single digits. 

7!  

They accepted 6 families into the program last month, and hopefully they invite at least 7 into the program this month! Otherwise we will be waiting until April or May! 

We picked out the bedroom that will be the nursery. We chose the wood-floored bedroom:) We were wondering if we were crazy for putting together the nursery so early, but it really occupies our minds during this waiting game. After learning that we could be called at anytime after our application is accepted, we thought we'd rather be more prepared than not prepared at all. There are a couple things we could hear on the other end of that phone call: either a mom just had a baby in the hospital and just made their decision, or there is an expecting mom that hasn't had their baby yet that chose us. 

We haven't started working on it yet, but here is the before picture:

More updates will come as we get them!

Most recent FAQ Answers!

FAQ

We have been asked multiple questions which brings us here writing FAQ answers!

We chose our adoption agency based off of two different referrals from family friends. We researched agencies and their fees and ratings, but we did not attend any information meetings other than the agency we chose which is Lutheran Social Services.

Originally when we were deciding to grow our family through adoption we were hoping to adopt from China or Ethiopia, before we knew about the requirements we did not meet. Lutheran Social Services' information meeting introduced us to the international requirements. China requires both parents to be at least 30 years old with multiple other requirements. Ethiopia has fewer restrictions than China, but we still did not qualify because of our age.

Before attending the meeting we had believed the myth that it is more challenging to adopt in country than out of country. Apparently it is the complete opposite! Domestic adoption is about half the price of international adoption, mainly because of travel expenses. Also, domestic adoption can take from 8 months to 18 on average and international is 24+ months most times. Obviously the time it takes to adopt really depends on when the perfect expecting mom finds us and believes we are just as perfect as she is!

The good news was we were not restricted from domestic adoption! We have chosen to apply for the Domestic Infant Open Adoption program.

There are two routes you can take for the Domestic Infant Adoption program with LSS

Route One: Outreach Only- This route allows your registration to jump to the top of the pile. If you chose this route you are choosing to promote yourself and use word of mouth to find yourself the perfect match. If you choose this route and want to change to route two you will end up having to start from the beginning and go behind everyone on the "registration waiting list" talked about below.

Route Two: Family Profile Book- This route puts you on a registration waiting list. Basically there is about a 4 month wait for your registration to be accepted. After your registration is accepted you then start the application process which includes credit, income, background DMV and home studies. Once the application is accepted, you get in line for the Family Profile Book (This is the book expecting moms look through to choose their baby's best fit home.)

It sounds like route one is a lot quicker, and sometimes we wonder if we should be going that route but we chose Route two: Family Profile Book. We came to the conclusion that we can still reach out and get the word out there that we are a waiting family and if we are found while we are in our waiting period we can switch quickly to route one without question.

There were a couple questions on if our adoption will be open or closed. We have chosen an open adoption.
We chose this program because we would like our child’s mother to be in his/her life. Of course our family will not be “normal” in others' eyes, but we never want to hold pure love away from our child. Together we will make a new normal! We get to set up an adoption plan that fits both of our desires. We are very open and are willing to hear any mothers wants with the plan for their child. We are welcoming any race or gender into our family with open arms.