Another Baby Todd

This is it everybody! The last week of our Fundraising February is here. With $20,000 in expenses behind us, there is still between $25,000-$30,000 ahead of us. It is daunting! With your help, $5,000 of that has been covered and we are hoping to cover a bonus goal of $2,000 to help us send our paperwork to India. As of now, we have raised $990 with $1,010 left to go!

Thank you for helping us make amazing things happen! If you want to be part of supporting us through this last week, you can click here: Link to Give

Now. Shall we go down memory lane, just a little bit? How many of you remember malls? (I actually hear they still exist 😉). When I was a kid, I have fond memories of visiting the mall with my bestie and walking around to window shop at all the stores. Living in FL, this was an ideal alternative to window shopping in adorable downtowns as we avoided heat and worse – humidity (I really hate humidity guys).

I still love window shopping. But driving to malls or downtowns is not exactly within my time budget and is quite a bit less fun for my young kiddo. Today, I window shop on my phone. It is perfect for a small break in my day and I still get to enjoy sharing (funny/absurd/cool/shocking/amazing) things with my friends (screenshots yo!).

This month, window shopping got me. Although we do have an Amazon wish list, it is pretty limited and small while we wait to learn our daughter’s age and more specific needs. But we can wish for some things, like what we want to decorate her space. So imagine my surprise when the very exact curtains I wished to put up in her room appeared in my window shopping feed. To add surprise on surprise, they were selling for only $10 and pick-up was within two miles of our house! 😱

We know that being creative in our constraints means that we work with what we have and adjust our imagination to the items that are available to us. There is so much joy to be found in that! And this week, we are holding so much joy in finding exactly what we wished for at an incredible deal and in incredible condition! Window shopping for the win!

How precious are these, guys???

And can you even handle how perfectly these colors matched? Because I cannot. I’m so happy!

And an extra special treat, Big Sister got some curtain upgrades herself, mixing up what she already had with what I already had. She loves her space!

Well fam, we are 2 weeks into (newly branded) Fundraising February. 😎

We are still in awe that our matching gift has been reached! So many happy dances over here. Thank you SO MUCH for your amazing generosity to our family! We have raised $5,735, leaving us with $1,265 left to reach our bonus $2,000 goal! I cannot express enough of how uplifted our hearts are by your help with these next adoption expenses! Thank you!! (Let’s pretend I’m trying to set a record for the most exclamation points in a paragraph, ok? 😁)💕

Want to help us close this gap? Join us here: Link to Give

Today I wanted to give you a little different view because I know some of you are like me and love numbers and details (excel is my best computer friend 🙈). So here we go, let’s talk secondhand furniture deals from our Creativity Series!

Remember that super cool kitchen storage area that Sam built out for us? (Check it out: here) Brand new pantry/storage space could have cost us $150 (or more!). We got this gem for only $10 and the rest? We used what we had! To sweeten the deal, we also got the extra utensils, plates, and bowls to take care of TWO little girls in the home for less than $10 from thrift stores! My favorite “use what you have” from the whole set-up was re-purposing my Nespresso pod holder for organizing forks and spoons and kids knives! (Let’s be real though, nothing in there is still organized hahaha)

Amara has an incredibly fun and perfect first-bed-for-a-kid. Don’t worry, there is an adorable picture below! Well, Amara is generously passing her bed on to her little sister which is a big savings on the little sister front, but another expense on the Amara needs a new bed front. There are some precious and fun loft style beds for as low as $170 (need that extra floor space!). But I had a lot more fun going on a Marketplace Quest and found a loft bed for only $40. It is in perfect condition and in a massive labor of love, it is now also PINK and ready for our big girl!

For the other bedroom furniture, you already know we were able to acquire an armoire for $20 and a dresser for FREE. Because of how her room is set-up, we needed to build out both clothing storage and toy storage space. It is hard to quantify how much we “could have” spent on all of this, but let’s say we bought a brand new wardrobe and dresser. We could have easily spent $500 or more.

You see where I’m going with this, right? Of course you do! 😁

All in all, what could have easily cost us over $800 cost us less than $100+labor of love. That’s not too bad, huh?

And here is a precious memory of our tiny little baby Amara and her very fun climbing bed!

She has grown so much, hasn’t she? 😍

Hi Everyone!

Eek, we have made it through week 1 of 4 with our $2,500 matching gift deadline slowly approaching. I debated on how I should title this post because it IS the next Creativity update, but it is ALSO our very first matching gift update. Whew. The challenges of blog writing 😜

I’m going to need you to play the imaginary drumroll in your heads right now, because here we go! Our hearts have been blown away at the generosity poured out on our family this past week. Guys. We received a total of $3,235!! That is not even a typo. That is OVER our goal and allows us to receive 100% of our matching gift!

All together, that is $5,735 that will help us cover our imminent adoption expense AND begins to support the expense after that.

I hope you can imagine this with me. The excitement we will feel when the phone call comes introducing us to our daughter will have absolutely NO shadow of finances hanging over it, because every penny of that $5,000 expense is covered and more.

With this incredible milestone being reached so early in our February Fundraising efforts, we wanted to ask if you would be interested in helping us cover another upcoming adoption expense? Within a couple months of being matched, all of the documents we have carefully collected need to be sent to India so that their courts can begin their process to finalize the adoption. The preparation for those documents includes a lot – copies, translation, shipping, and more. Our fee for this is $2,000. You have already helped us cover $735 of that $2,000. Would you help us cover the remaining $1,265?
Join us here: Link to Give

Reaching this point in the adoption journey has truly taken an investment. Already we have put forward $20,000 to cover various adoption expenses as most grants do not accept applications from families until after our match. We will not give up on applying for grants, but as many grants report back to us, there are more families in need than there are funds available to give. Your help is an incredible encouragement to our hearts as we continue to wait for the phone call that our little girl is ready to be matched with us! (Woah, so serious. Seriously, seriously, we love you all so much!)

And with that… back to our Creativity Update!! 💕

What a crazy January it was here in Orlando. When Sam and I set out to find good deals on furniture, it was a big priority for me that we were able to do things like painting in January. Because January is the month in FL where we have low humidity and cool days, right? The beauty of winter in FL.

Nature has had other plans. Our weekends have been cloudy, humid, rainy, or (and this is wild to me) too cold to paint! Insanity, I tell you. Doesn’t nature know we have a baby to prepare for?? 😉 Best laid plans, I guess.

Still. We DID manage to finish our very fun furniture project and now have the big pieces we need to welcome our little girl home! I bet you can’t wait to see the room’s final set-up now!! I can’t wait either!

Because of prior construction in the room, it needs an armoire for clothing as opposed to a closet. We found this gem in excellent condition for $20! Our final touch will be installing the clothing rod to hang her precious clothes.

This dresser was truly in dire (and free!) condition. I actually forgot to take our before picture before sanding! 😁 We also took extra time to paint the inside of the drawers so that they can be converted into nice pullout shelves for easier toy storage if that is better for the room’s needs.

We interrupt our previously scheduled Creativity Update with this important message… (I totally wrote it in that voice, guys).

Hello, hello! I am so excited to write this post today. You guys know that we have been working really hard to save our pennies by any means. In fact, I hold saving money as one of my jobs because I don’t have an income (work from home, ammiright?). Another job I have taken on during this adoption is applying for grants. It is a surprising amount of writing and paperwork!

Some Grants have not come through, others are pending, and others still require us to be matched before we can even apply. While we hold on to hope and keep putting forward the effort, the reality is, costs are adding up now. With that..

I am so honored to share that we have been offered a Matching Gift of up to $2,500 to help!

Our next step in the adoption process is being matched with our kiddo and as soon as we are matched, we owe our next big payment of $5,000. This matching gift, with your help, could help us cover the entire expense and give us the boost we need as we apply and wait for decisions from grants who want to see that we are already matched!

Have you met fiercely independent Stephanie? 🙃 Asking you to join us financially is not my strongest strength. However, receiving this matching gift is a really exciting way that our family can meet the financial needs facing us.. and.. in order to earn those matching funds, we really do need your help!

Your gift will be matched dollar for dollar, but we are only eligible to raise funds through February 28th. We are also so happy to share that we have a platform where any gift given will be tax-deductible. So! If you are able to join us on the financial side of this journey, feel free to follow the link below:

PureCharity: https://purecharity.com/another-baby-todd

Thank you, thank you, thank you for considering a gift to help our family earn matching funds! And stay tuned next week as we return to our Creativity Project Updates!! 😁💕

The total cost to adopt from India is $40,000-$50,000. So far we have covered half of those expenses. For more information on the costs associated with adoption, please feel free to visit our agency’s website: https://www.awaa.org/india-adoption#cost

Sneak Preview of our painting efforts…

Happiest of Mondays to you!

No news on the adoption front, but as you know, this is waiting time. We can’t wait for the call that will introduce us to our baby girl! 😁

In the meantime…

Preparations continue at our house as we dream of New Baby Todd joining our family. Even without knowing her age, there is plenty we know she will need, and wow are there a lot of people in the community passing on or selling little kid things! We have been amazed by the amount we can save if we plan ahead, have patience, and stay persistent.

Two of our BEST deals are sitting in the garage right now (do deals get better than free for pick-up, guys?). They require a little bit of TLC – but we have time to invest and are so excited to share the results with you!

Stay tuned for before and after pictures!

Another Monday, another week of waiting. As time goes on, it feels like the intensity of waiting grows. Knowing that the next step means seeing our daughter’s face for the first time is a really big deal! And now that the busy holiday season is behind us, we feel the intensity more and more. Checking the mailbox daily has been replaced by keeping our phones on loud, loud, loud alert with each incoming SPAM call causing a minor heart attack 😉

Preparing our home for our future baby girl is one of the most fulfilling parts of waiting. Throughout this adoption our finances look very different. We are now on one income and everything is just a lot more expensive than it was three years ago! Whew. But as told to me by a friend: creativity loves constraints. And we have genuinely had fun being creative within our constraints!

Our first creative project started in the kitchen. We knew more plates, bowls, and utinsels were needed for our growing family and found some amazing deals at thrift stores! But space in the kitchen was already tight as is our budget. So off we went on a Marketplace Quest, finding a perfectly sized cabinet for a perfectly sized price. 😁 Combined with our own storage we made a perfect new space in our kitchen for all of our kiddos’ needs!

Baby girl, our kitchen is ready and waiting for you!! (Amara loves it too!!)

It has been another exciting week for our little household. Amara is now 7 years old and after celebrating at home she was excited to head back to school to celebrate with her friends.

If that wasn’t exciting enough, we also received our US Approval to adopt which means we are officially on the waiting list to be matched with our baby girl! We know that there are many families waiting who entered the process ahead of us, but we are already so excited and eager to see our little girl’s face for the first time!

There is still very little for us to actionably do on the adoption side of things. Until we have a match we do not have additional paperwork to gather and many of the grant programs available to us also would like us to have a match before we apply. So that leaves us with – (im)patiently waiting! 😁 We can handle this, right? Right.

Happiest of birthdays to our precious Amara!

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.