Another Baby Todd

Hello! We are officially back from a wonderful holiday season and so excited to see what the New Year has for us as we continue our adoption journey. Being in a season of waiting is hard, but it was a bonus gift to wait through the holidays. The busy season was a helpful distraction and we had a couple precious gifts to help us celebrate in a special way this year!

Our first incredible gift was the opportunity to travel to India! Not only did we get to share the holiday season with friends who live in India, we also got to visit the place where we met Amara and people who loved and cared for Amara before we met her. Words cannot begin to express our gratitude for the chance to return to Amara’s birth country, experiencing life where her life began and our future daughter’s begins as well.

Sitting in the car as we drove back to the airport for our return journey was hard for all of us. As we felt the sadness of our trip ending we received another incredible gift: news that approval arrived from India to continue our adoption journey! Now we wait for our US approval to arrive. Once we receive our US approval, we will officially be waiting to be matched with our future daughter!

The journey ahead is still long. We will have to wait to be matched with our daughter. Wait for court approvals. Wait for immigration documents. And I’m sure many other waiting steps along the way. But our hearts are filled with gratitude for what this holiday season has meant to our family and hope for all that the New Year will bring.

Wishing you all the best in this New Year!

Stephanie, for the family

Hello, hello! It has been a few weeks, and there is very little to report from an adoption perspective. We continue to wait (im)patiently for approval from the US and India to adopt. All standard/normal/expected timelines tell us that the wait will be a while longer. Don’t worry, we still check our mail every day and can’t wait to tell you when those approvals come through! 😉

In the meantime, holiday season has been a gift in so many ways. Not only is it so much fun to prepare and celebrate, the busyness has been a wonderful distraction. I know so many can relate to the heartache of waiting to have your child in your arms and knowing there is no control over the timing of that moment arriving. We feel so fortunate that this window of waiting is happening during such a busy season.

I plan to take another short break from updating you on our adoption progress. Plan on my return in early January! And of course if any big news comes through before then, I will very, very excitedly jump online to share.

We wish all of you a very happy and precious holiday season! See you in 2026!!

One requirement for adoptive parents is participation in a significant amount of training. While some of the training is curated and required, there is truly an endless amount of knowledge for parents to collect. In these moments, where our only “adoption job” is to wait for approvals, I love to fill my time with podcasts, vlogs, and books.

We could easily fall into a false sense of preparedness. We have experience. We’ve been through this before. But every child is unique and every early life experience is unique. The tools and skills we have practiced may not help our second child feel safe and loved like they helped our first kiddo. It has been invaluable to return to old resources and have our memories refreshed and it has been exciting to find new resources and begin practicing new skills as we wait for our family to grow.

Learning is an endless adventure. We can’t wait to meet our little girl, to get to know her personality, and to see which skills and resources will best meet her needs and support her as she grows.

Just a short post this week. No news on the adoption front. Still waiting on US and India’s approval to adopt, but this is all within the normal waiting period.

In the meantime, Happy Halloween! We had a blast trick-or-treating this year with Princess Jasmine (from the live action, yo!) 😉💕

As a person prepares to adopt, there are many, many, many warnings given to them about all the waiting: waiting because things take time, waiting because there are unexpected delays, waiting because we don’t even know why we are waiting right now. Lots and lots of waiting.

Sam and I had been married for nearly 10 years before we met Amara. For us, it was long enough. We had so many cherished years as a couple and we were ready for a third little family member. Still.. being independent, child-free, and dual-income left us with such a unique season of freedom. So even though the wait was hard, we cherished every single moment that the two of us had together.

Adopting our second child is an incredibly different experience of waiting. It is hard to describe how different it feels. What I can express is that some things are more painful while others are less, some things fill us with more fear while other fears are completely gone, and with three hearts longing for this fourth little family member, the sadness of waiting rotates between all of us.

What stays the same is our principle on waiting. It has been long enough. We are ready to be a family of four. But this season of waiting is a unique season – our last season of being a family of three. So while the wait is hard, we will cherish every moment the three of us have together.

Wishing you all a happy, cherished Monday!

Stephanie, for the family

We had a lot to celebrate this week with Diwali approaching and confirmation that we are officially registered with India requesting permission to adopt! 🥳

There is very little for us to do at this stage of the adoption process. Paperwork gathering is on hold until approval is received from both the US and India. This is our first big waiting point in the process. However, with winter holidays approaching we know life will be plenty busy. In fact we already celebrated our first big holiday of the season!

Amara had so much fun helping us decorate with diyas and rangoli. We ate delicious food and got to light one sparkler before the rain sent us inside. 😁 We will have to save the rest of our fireworks for another day.

Happy Diwali!

Happy Monday! Due to some technical difficulties at our agency, we are still waiting with held breath to hear that our application with India is complete. Still, as we wait, I started to look back on how things went in 2020 vs. today. I can’t wait to see how things go with our US application in the coming weeks as well as our application to India. 💕

When we received notifications from the US side of this process that we were ready to go for fingerprinting, I e-mailed our agency and asked if this is going fast because it felt so fast! Turns out, we are pretty much on schedule for the average timelines on the US side. But you know what? It’s really cool when normal feels fast. It’s less cool when fast feels slow, but that is what reflecting is for, right?

Adoption 2020
Started Process: 1/8/2020
Applied for approvals: 8/31/2020
Overall – Start to Applications: 9 months
US Approval: 16 week wait (4 weeks longer than average)
India’s Approval: 2 week wait (10 weeks shorter than average)

Adoption 2025
Started Process: 8/4/2025
Applied with US: 9/12/2025
Applied with India: 10/?/2025
Overall – Start to Applications: 2 months!

So how can I not be amazed looking back like this? It took us almost 9 months in 2020 to apply with both countries for approval. We were able to accomplish that in just over 2 months this time (assuming we will be applied with India this week of course 😁).

We could not have done this without help from so many people. Our home study, medical appointments, personal evaluations, travel to my birth state, friends in Sam’s birth state.. I can’t express my gratitude enough for everyone rushing these steps with us!

💕 I can’t wait to tell my daughter each of your names and how each of you helped her come home faster that we could have done on our own. Thank you!💕

So what comes next? We are required to have approval from both India and the US before we are eligible to be matched with our daughter. Approval timelines can be unpredictable for so many reasons. Our hope continues to be that approval will come from both countries by the end of the year, but as with everything, we know that the wait can take longer. In the meantime, we will have more paperwork to gather, grants to apply for, and a house to prepare for a new little one!

Amara and Dad being silly in the kitchen.

Happy Tuesday everyone. I’m behind schedule for an update, but am here with very happy news!

Last Tuesday we thought we were futilely checking for updates on Sam’s birth certificate only to be shocked with a tracking number. The birth certificate arrived on Wednesday (yes I did push refresh on that tracking status many, many times!). Thanks to incredibly generous friends in Sam’s birth state, we were able to have the birth certificate certified Friday morning!! With a photo of the certification, we officially have everything we need to register for approval to adopt from India. 😁

Registration doesn’t happen overnight, it is a process. So now that everything is in our agency’s hands we patiently wait for news that we are registered. In the meantime, our US process is moving forward. We have an appointment for fingerprinting next week and after that, more waiting!

We are relieved that Sam’s birth certificate “delay” was hardly a delay at all and our hearts are filled with so much gratitude for friends willing to take time out of their busy day and schedule to help us avoid a longer wait for the certification. Our hearts are absolutely filled up thanks to the help and support so many people have given us to make it this far in the adoption process at such a fast pace.

Stay tuned for news that we are officially registered with India!

Hello from a very cool kid from a very fun school event:

Well, it had to happen eventually, didn’t it? 😉

We were notified last Monday that the department handling Sam’s birth certificate was working on orders from 8/13 (our request was submitted on 9/10 yikes!). We were in denial and checked our mail box every day (ok, multiple times a day) in hopes that the update was wrong, but sure enough we called on Thursday and confirmed that the department had made it up to orders submitted on 8/25, but they really were that far behind.

As with my birth certificate, the only way to expedite the process is to travel to the county where Sam was born in order to obtain the birth certificate. However, unlike my birth certificate, Sam’s birth county does not print the very specific type of birth certificate that we can have certified by the state in compliance with international adoption standards. So what do we do? We wait.

We did get an update from the US side of things that our application for approval from the US government was received. Additionally, our adoption agency confirmed that all of the other documents we gathered are approved and ready to be submitted to India as soon as Sam’s birth certificate arrives! No errors in our other paperwork is very happy news.

Hopefully the office working on birth certificates will continue to make amazing progress. I mean, in 4 days they made it through 13 days of orders. That seems pretty impressive to me? Regardless, we look forward to sharing good news when it arrives!

Stephanie, for the family 💕

Dressing up for a formal family photo to include in our application to India

This past week has been some kind of a rollercoaster, I think. After finding out we can request approval to adopt from India, we began furiously gathering documents only to discover one major roadblock: my birth certificate. As it turns out, mine would take a super long time to arrive. As in months. Imagine my shock. We obtained a complete home study in 5 weeks, but it would take us 8 or more to get my birth certificate? Sam’s we could at least expedite, but mine couldn’t arrive until the end of November at the earliest. The idea of keeping our kiddo waiting 8 weeks longer becase of a birth certificate delay was a deeply unpleasant feeling.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to feel the stress of that delay for long, because I have some amazing and generous parents!

The only way to expedite this step is to go and request my birth certificate in person and my parents made that possible by turning it into a Father-Daughter Adventure! Sam and my mom held down the fort at home while Dad and I headed off, using our paperwork journey as an excuse to visit family we haven’t seen in too long and enjoyed sights and memories from childhood.

In three days we managed to obtain a seal on all of our paperwork, with the only outstanding document left being Sam’s birth certificate. In fact, at this very moment, all of our documents are in our family coordinator’s hands ready to go to India the second Sam’s birth certificate arrives!

After checking the mail constantly, we did get a notification that there is a delay in shipping Sam’s birth certificate. It may take an extra week to get here, but we are hopeful that there will be good news on his birth certificate soon. Even still, a short delay on Sam’s birth certificate will be far faster than waiting until late this year for mine to arrive! So we continue to be filled with so much gratitude as our list of people helping us rush on ahead grows. 💕

Adventure: Day 1 – Still can’t believe I am on my way to pick-up a birth certificate with my Dad!

Adventure: Day 2 – A very old, very beautiful building housing my birth certificate!

Adventure: Nature time! Because it isn’t an adventure for Stephanie until she finds some water