No Match

Hello friends,

We found out late last night that the last mother we presented to has chosen a different family.

It was a long time for us to wait to find that out (hence Diane's last post). We know that God has the perfect child picked out for us, so we rest in that even when we're disappointed. Disappointed but not discouraged!

Thanks for your ongoing support, and we'll continue to post updates.

Take courage, He's in the waiting

Hi friends!
Honestly, this waiting time has been hard on my heart. I am full of hopes and dreams for our family, but I have to keep surrendering it all to God.

Recently I was talking with a friend and she looked at me and said, "You look sad." It was right then I realized I was sad. I've been keeping myself busy with life and Nora, avoiding the sadness of waiting. Avoiding the doubt that no one will pick us.

When we are fighting lies, we need truth.

This song has been so encouraging to me! It is packed full of truth. I hope it encourages you too.

Presenting Today

Hello Friends,

We are among the families who will be presented to a new birth mother today.

About all we know is that they are in Florida, the mother has a small drug habit, and the baby will be a little girl, due in late August!

The presentation is today so we should hear back by late next week.

Please join us in praying for this birth mother and baby. It can't be easy for the mother to have to choose a family, so we pray for peace for her decision. And the baby may be born with side effects from the mother's drug use, so pray for her transition to life and her adoptive family, whoever that may end up being!

Thank you for partnering with us.
Ben

Potential Match Update

Well, it was an unusually long wait, but we found out that we were not matched with the birthmother that we wrote about a few weeks ago. It was strange, but she actually went MIA for a little while until she gave birth to her baby... and chose a different family.

We trust in God's sovereignty and will continue to hear from other potential matches.

Thanks for your prayers, and we'll keep posting updates here. God bless and happy 4th of July!

Support Letter

We wanted to post the support letter that we're sending friends and family. If you don't receive one and would like a physical copy, please let us know and we'll be happy to send one over. :-)

Dear Family and Friends,

Our family is growing!  We are so excited to be in the process of adopting a baby!

This has been a dream of each of ours for many years, since before we were married. Individually, we had both considered adoption to be a hopeful dream, and together we have been waiting for the right time to move forward with the process. We are so excited that God is giving us the go-ahead, and that now is the time to pursue having another child!

We have actually been on the adoption path for over a year now; the whole thing is quite a process. First we signed up with a consultant agency, Christian Adoption Consultants. Then we had to get homestudy-approved, passing state and federal background checks, fingerprints, extensive interviews, and even a visit to our house. All that allowed the agency to conclude that we have a safe, loving home, and are eligible to adopt a child! Next we had to create a 20-page photo book of our lives and family. This “profile” gets shown to birthmothers who need to choose a family to parent their baby.

All of this is so exciting and scary, as it probably should be. However, we have watched God provide over and over as we walk forward on this journey. For example, He took care of the homestudy costs: the agency dropped their price right when we contacted them, two friends generously donated money out of the blue, and a solar company offered a cash incentive to install panels on our roof! All those happened within about a month of each other, and we ended up with the exact amount needed.

We also watched God provide with the profile books. As we concluded the design and counted up how many we would need to print, it was about twice what we had expected. But as Ben completed our taxes, the book publisher ran a sale that brought our total down to just under what our tax return ended up being. We see how God clearly orchestrated both of these events to move us along at His timing.

And now at this point, we could be matched with a baby at any time! We hope you’ll support us in prayer as we continue our journey. We need prayer for patience and wisdom, and also for the birthmother who has to make several tough decisions that will eventually lead to us. Finally, pray for the child who God already knows will be ours.

It is hard for us to ask; publicly admitting our needs is not part of our modern American culture, but we need some other help with this final step as well. For us, the biggest and most daunting challenge is the cost. We anticipate the final cost to total $35,000, mostly in medical and legal costs. We’ve been applying for grants and zero-interest adoption loans. We plan to hold additional fundraisers and we’ve set up a page at adopttogether.org/benanddiane where donations are tax-deductible.

While it’s the most tangible, money will not be our only need. We’ve already received aide from friends in the forms of layout design on our profile book, medical advice, and legal counsel, for example. If you have a skill that you think might be helpful to us, we’ll accept any kind of help. We also anticipate that we’ll need to travel out of state twice. If you travel a lot and have amassed some frequent flier miles or hotel points that you’d be willing to donate, that could be huge for us. I don’t think we even understand all the ways you might be able to help, but God does.

We’ve seen Him provide in so many unexpected ways already that we have faith He will continue to do so. More than anything we’ve already mentioned, we treasure your prayers for blessing, wisdom, and discernment for both us and also for the birth mom. Thank you for being our community, our support and our partners in this next step for our family.

With love,

Ben & Diane

Quick Update - Potential Match

Hey everyone, thanks for your continued prayers and support!

This is just a quick update, but I wanted to let you know that we're under consideration for a potential match right now. We are excited, we are nervous, and we have to try to be a little patient! Haha.

Our profile was presented to a birthmother out in Florida just the other day. We are one of an unknown number of profiles that she's considering. She'll spend a few days looking through all the books before selecting a family. I don't know when we'll hear anything, but it should be within the next week or so.

Whether we're a match or not, please pray. Pray for wisdom for the mom as she makes a difficult decision. Pray for the baby and the family he or she will be placed with.

Thanks! I just wanted to keep everyone up to date on what's going on. Things are moving. :-)

God Sightings Part 2

Diane introduced the idea of God Sightings, and I'd like to continue that by sharing how His provision got us moving in our journey, not once but twice. While these stories are both about money, that's not the point of this post - it's about God meeting our needs!

After signing up with CAC, our next move was to complete our homestudy. We knew the cost would be about $3,000 and we weren't quite comfortable with that just coming out of our general savings. We knew we'd either have to raise it or find other provision.

As we started talking with a local social services agency about getting our homestudy from them, they just happened to lower their price from $3,000 to $2,500. And right at that same time, we received checks from two friends offering their support, one for $500 and the other for $1,000! Suddenly, we only needed to find $1k.

All of that was enough to tell us that it was God's timing. We were ready to sign up, knowing that the rest would come in. But then we got another surprise - from a solar company of all places. Several months earlier, a salesman had come to our door, asking to put panels on our roof for free while they'd maintain ownership (a PPA arrangement). Well I was taking my time researching that, making sure that the costs were competitive, the company was reputable, etc. and had pretty much just decided, "OK, let's go for it," when they called us up and offered an incentive: they would give us $1,000 if we signed up by the end of that month. Well suddenly it was a no-brainer! We gave it a week of prayer to be sure, but in the end our homestudy was paid for. Wow.

We had a similar experience a few months later with our profile books. We knew it would cost a few hundred dollars to print them and were ready to use our savings for that. As it came time to print and we counted up how many we would need, it started looking like we would need over $900 for the whole thing. That was much more than we had been preparing for, but we were still ready to proceed with it.

Well in God's way, He provided the means again. As we were prepping to print, the printer ended up running a 30% off sale, bringing our total down to about $650. The same day, I was finishing our taxes and you know what our return totaled? That's right, $650. Wow again.

Between the timing and the amounts, we see that God was showing up to move us along at the right times. It's been humbling to be so uncertain in the moment, but we take comfort as we look at the perfect journey that we've been traveling. Our next step is to be matched and we just expect to be presented with the perfect baby and family at the ideal time. God is sovereign.

God Sightings Part 1

There are moments in life where I feel so encouraged by God. I feel like He sees me, He knows me and He's got my back. These are usually times when a need is miraculously met, or something perfectly comes together that I believe is beyond circumstance. We have had numerous experiences like this in relation to our adoption and we are going to start documenting them in this series called 'God Sightings'.

These won't be chronological; we'll write them as we're able. But I've been wanting to write this one down for a while.

In the private adoption world, it is customary to bring the birth-mom a small gift when you visit her in the hospital when she is having the baby. We have some basic guidelines from Christian Adoption Consultants with gift ideas. It is usually something small, a silver bracelet or charm, flowers or almost anything you think she might like that is less than $50. The $50 cap is because we can't in any way insinuate we are buying a baby - that is bad.

Honestly, on our budget $50 is a big deal. We are a single income household in the silicon valley. Things are kinda tight.

I wanted to be proactive about getting something for the birth-mom because I would love to give her something personal. However, this presented many questions: How do you buy for someone you haven't met yet? What's her style? What in the world would someone like as a gift when they have just given birth and are probably really emotional? What would be meaningful to her?

So, all these thoughts were bouncing around my brain late last year as I was perusing Etsy, magazines, pinterest, etc.

Then, BAM! the perfect flyer came in the mail!  It was a $50 coupon to use in store at a high end jewelry store with no minimum purchase! So, I could spend $50 for free!! Yay God!!

Side note: This flyer came because two years ago the necklace I wear every day broke. I was at the mall, passed this store and just popped in to have it fixed. I maybe spent $12 for them to fix my chain and I signed up for their newsletter!

I jumped on the jewelry store website and started looking at what they had. I was praying the whole time that God would make it clear what she would like and that it would be $50 or less. I had looked at just about everything without falling in love when I saw this necklace.

I liked the LOVE design and thought it was a simple, understated nod to the LOVE she would always have for her baby. I also liked the arrow because of this verse, "Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth," Psalm 127:3-4.

I thought this was worth seeing in person. Miracle #2, I found easy parking at the mall the week before Christmas!

When I got there the very nice sales guy had no idea what I was talking about, had never seen the necklace before. Ugh!! I walked around and around, not seeing anything similar. Then, his shift ended and the new sales lady came to check in on me. She asked me lots of questions about what the person I'm buying the gift for is like. What was the occasion, etc. I felt so awkward. I didn't want to launch into my whole story, but she wasn't leaving me much option with all of her questions. I ended up telling her all about our adoption and she was nearly moved to tears! Also, she had seen the necklace before and eagerly took up the hunt with me, looking in all the numerous glass display cases.

Then she called from a few cases over from me, "I found it!" I rushed over and saw this.

I had no idea this message was inscribed on the back of the LOVE charm! Honestly, if I had known when I looked online I probably would have passed it up as being too direct to the birth-mom's pain or emotions. However, given the circumstance this seemed like the perfect gift!

The necklace was $49.99 and somehow I wasn't charged tax. I walked away paying nothing, and believing God picked out just the right present for our precious, brave birth-mom! I can't wait to meet her.

Application Time

Hi Friends!

As with lots of things in life, adoption has a lot of hurry up & wait cycles. It's always frustrating to wait, but we have been plugging away at applications to agencies.

Our dining room table has been looking a lot like this lately.

Good news is we will have several applications mailed out today! Woohoo!
We are still working on two agency applications which ask for a ton of documentation and writing. We will be getting those out as soon as possible.

Profile books ready to go!

Concurrently, Ben has been researching adoption grants and zero interest adoption loans. We have to have all of our funding ready to go in order to bring a baby home, so we are researching all avenues we can.

This is just a quick peak at our journey for this boring paperwork stage.

Thanks for all of the positive comments, love, prayers and support sent our way! We truly appreciate you all and couldn't do this without our community!

Diane & Ben

We're Adopting

Hi Friends and Family!

Wow, we’ve wanted to make this announcement for a long time – We’re adopting!!

Seriously, we are thrilled! We have planned on adoption being part of our family story since we were dating.

Here are the answers to some of the questions people have been asking us and a little about where we stand in our process.

We are hoping for a domestic newborn adoption and open to any gender or ethnicity. We would prefer an open adoption and are looking forward to talking with a birth family about their hopes.

We’ve taken many steps to get to this point.  We’ve signed on with Christian Adoption Consultants. We’ve completed our home study.  We’ve completed our family profile, which is essentially a photo book that prospective birth families will use to help them pick a family. We’ve had so much help with every step along the way, and we feel very loved and supported by our friends and family. Thank you!!

Our next step is application – we apply to a number of adoption agencies to be added to their lists. From there we can be selected by a family and if all works out, after completing a mountain of paperwork, we would end up with our baby.

Finances unfortunately play a large part of adoption. We are looking at this adoption costing between 30-40k, which is basically due upon placement of a child. We are using our personal savings, applying to grants and hoping for individual donors. We’ve set up a profile at AdoptTogether so that people who wish to donate to us could do it in a way that’s actually tax-deductible. How cool is that!

We have already watched God move to get us to this point. Diane is going to write it all down one of these days J  Thank you for reading, and we’re happy to answer any more of your questions about our journey.