Valentine's day thoughts

As any holiday approaches, we dream of what it will be like with a little one..

We dream of the small things we want to be doing with our son or daughter.  We have been dreaming of the heart shaped cookies we would bake, the Valentines we'd make, the outfits we would dress our little one in, and much more. Thinking of all these different things we wish we were doing is heavy on our heart, but we do keep reminding ourselves that without this journey, we may not have appreciated the little things we are going to appreciate when we have our son or daughter. We will never take one moment for granted. We pray every night for the chance to become parents and we look forward to every cry and every sleepless night we have in our future! 

We wanted to express how much we already love our future child and our future child's birth family. These are people we haven't met, but we think about every day and can not wait to meet! 

I was sitting on the couch thinking about how we could express our love for these special people we have never met..and I am not sure how it came to me, but I thought about how we are searching for someone we already love. That is where we came up with a heart with a piece of it missing. I anxiously called my sister's friend who is a photographer (BeeGee Photography) and asked her if she could do a photo shoot the next day! She said yes ..so I ran to the store to buy some paint and drew the heart on some cardboard. Jordan cut it out and painted it and voila!- we had the perfect symbol to represent how we were feeling. 

It was too cold out for our pup, so he only got to be in some of the pictures. He mostly stayed in the warm car! As we were taking these photos, an elderly couple walked by hand-in-hand and saw our sign that read "We can't wait to adopt!" They glanced at it and then immediately turned around to tell us how their three kids were adopted and now they have grandchildren. They were so proud and I immediately pictured that being us in the future. Oh, how we hope that is us one day! 

So we ask you - and anyone that comes across our blog - please share our story and share our pictures! Don't forget to ask your friends to share too. We are so blessed to have such a strong following, and so many people that are rooting for us!

xoxo

Kaylah and Jordan

Waiting is the hardest part

Waiting is by far the hardest part of the entire process so far. Last year consisted of us being so busy getting things together it just flew by! Now we have had way more time to ourselves. The Holidays kept us busy - we had a full two weeks off and we spent every waking moment with our families.

Our profile went in the waiting family book on November 17th along with that our family was posted on Lutheran Social Service's website .It has all the same content - just another form of exposure to help us find the right person:)

Here it is if you want to see it : LSS Website

Here is the introduction to our profile on LSS's Website

LSS's Facebook Family of the Week Post

 In addition to being placed on the website we were their Facebook Family of the Week ! We had sooo many family members, friends and even strangers helping us "share" their post! Honestly the wait is hard, but seeing all the support we have from everyone really helps us get through it. So THANK YOU to everyone for everything you have done for us.
The entire post said,
"Hi! We're Jordan and Kaylah Gerads from Otsego, MN. We met over eleven years ago at a campground in Crosslake, Minnesota, when we were barely teenagers and have been married now for two years. We and our little teacup yorkie, Padraig, are incredibly excited to grow our family through adoption! We love to play board and card games, attend sporting events, and go on annual week-long camping trips with our family. To learn more about us, please visit our Facebook page atwww.facebook.com/jordanandkaylahadopt. Feel free to email us at jordanandkaylahadopt@gmail.com or contact our adoption worker, Dianne Delaney at 320-251-7700 or Dianne.Delaney@lssmn.org. "



Also our facebook page reached over 500 likes with the help of Kaylah's sister.  She noticed we were only 13 away and not only did she help us get 13 people to follow our story she got 53!! If you have facebook and haven't "liked" our page yet and want to please do!  facebook.com/jordanandkaylahadopt

541 likes??? WOWZA!!

We can not wait until we get to share our lives with our son or daughter. This Christmas we kept imagining what life will be like once we are a family of three. We hung a stocking to symbolize the love we already have for a child we have not met. 

Our pup is also anxiously awaiting a human brother or sister. However he does love testing everything out to be sure it's safe. We feel so bad that we didn't write more about him in our profile- he is so spoiled and he gets to go anywhere and everywhere with us..minus the grocery store and work:)

Testing for future human sibling

Helping us model the rug we bought for the nursery

Looking for birdies with our nephew Kale

Being silly with Jordan

Kaylah baking Christmas cookies!

Niece and Nephew opening Christmas presents!

Jordan's dad-future Grandpa
 on Thanksgiving day! Yumm

One of our Christmas trees!

Jordan and Kale (nephew) on Christmas Eve
 building with Leggos!

Church on Christmas Eve! We sing Silent Night in
 the Dark and light candles. Our favorite part of the service. 

Our fire place! We can't wait to sit by this and watch Christmas
movies with our future little one! 

Kaylah and her sister -Future hopeful auntie!

Our Niece Braelynne and pup Paddy

Christmas at Kaylah's grandma JJ's home on Christmas day!

Happy New Year everyone!!!!!

We are praying that 2014 is the year we become a family <3 

Love, 

Kaylah and Jordan 

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