Another Baby Todd

Eeeekkk!!!!!! It happened!! We have been matched with our precious little girl! 😍💕

Last week was an incredible whirlwind of activity. After being matched, there is a formal process to go through in accepting your child. Medical reviews are required, training is required, and as always, more paperwork. We and our agency absolutely rushed through these steps so, so quickly and we are officially moving forward with the next stage of our adoption.

From this point forward, all of our work is focused on finalizing the adoption. Documents go back and forth between our family and India, immigration paperwork has to progress here in the US, and we have to go through the official court system in India. We have a very wide timeframe right now to expect for travel: anywhere from 6 – 12 months. However, as milestones are met along the way, we will see that travel estimate become more narrow.

I am incredibly excited to share our daughter’s name, age, and picture with you! However, while the adoption is in progress, we are asked to protect her privacy and cannot post her picture or share information about her. What I can tell you is that Amara cannot stop saying “She’s so cute!!!!!!” every time we mention her. And guys, she is SO cute!

I can also share with you that we have a baby registry started. Why am I sharing this? Well, although I cannot share information about her age with you, there may be some clues for you as you look at the registry items needed. 😏👍👍
Link: Baby Registry

As a promise for the future.. When we meet our baby girl and she joins our family in person, our blog will absolutely be the place to “meet” her. We cannot wait to introduce you all, officially!

In the meantime, I hope Amara’s excitement and joy fills your heart with joy too!

Happy Monday!

We are taking a small blog break (just this week) and will be back with updates again next week. 💕

Stephanie, for the family

It seems like Amara’s first grade year is flying by us. Today she begins the last quarter of the school year! There has been so much to learn this year and Spring Break has definitely made us excited for Summer. We love the rhythm of the school year, but we also love spending more time together and finding ways to adventure.

We cherished every moment of Spring Break! With our extra time we got to visit parks with cousins, play games, and discovered Amara’s new favorite activity: shopping! We introduced her to Goodwill for the first time and had so much fun looking at everything (seriously tho). It was so fun to see her tastes as we filled in some closet gaps for the hot season.

As for the adoption, it is Monday again. And every Monday starts a new week of hope for news about our daughter. It is hard – we thought about her so much this week. We wished she could be here for these special moments and that we could know her precious face and age and size to imagine her in all the adorable little clothes we looked at. We are eager for the next stage to begin and for the day we will finally be together with her.

Until then, we wait and enjoy each other.

As we continue to wait for this precious phone call, we are starting a fun filled week. Friday officially launched Spring Break! We are excited to have extra time together and adventure as much as possible.

Thursday we got to enjoy visiting school while the kids participated in Field Day – an incredibly fun way to end the quarter and launch Spring Break. There were so many fun activities that the kids got to enjoy! We loved every moment of seeing Amara thrive in this space she usually gets to experience on her own. She is growing up and continues to fill our hearts with so much joy. 🥰

A new week begins and the steady pace of the school year continues for our family. We appreciate the fixed routine of the school year where everyone knows what each day holds. Between school hours and homework, we treasure closely the free time we have to play together, do art together, and explore nature together. As Amara grows, we find so much joy in hearing the details of her days apart from us and all that she is learning in class.

The steady pace also brings stability and comfort as we wait for the call matching us with our waiting daughter. It brings to mind the image of a newly sprouted flower. We can long for it to bloom, but it will bloom in its own time without being rushed or stopped in it’s cycle. Meanwhile the river flows ever by, steady, constant, and comforting. I love how nature teaches. Today it reminds me that I exist in these cycles too and somehow that brings me a great deal of peace. Though I may spend some time staring at my own little flower wishing for it to bloom today!

💕

Amara and Dad working on a school project together 🥰

Happy March everyone! Can you believe it is March?

When February started and we shared the privilege of receiving a matching gift, it was so hard to truly imagine achieving that goal, much less exceeding it. But here we are, a month later and your generosity has blown us away.

Thanks to you, we raised $3,490 in a single month! Combined with our $2,500 match, that is just under $6,000 to help us bring our daughter home. Thank you, thank you for this incredible gift to our family!

As we look ahead, the next expense and a half are covered which lightens our hearts and the financial burden on us. It is hard to put into words how much that means to us, so I’ll just say once more, thank you! Our hearts begin a new month incredibly full.

Reflecting back on our winter season, we have been able to celebrate and experience so much excitement. Part of that is thanks to you btw. 😁 Getting approved for a match also created bonus anticipation beyond the holiday season and now, here we are, getting ready for Spring! A season of new beginnings and fresh starts as fresh life returns to our outdoor spaces. 🥰 I love the changing of the seasons.

We are also hoping for the next season of our adoption to begin. It has officially been 2 months of waiting to be matched with our little girl. While the call could come any day now, it could still be several months more to wait.

By contrast to adopting in the pandemic, 2 months is really nothing. Back in 2020 the expected wait time for a match was up to 9 months. Our wait was 13 months before we saw our little girl’s face for the first time. That moment was pure magic. I remember with full clarity who I was on the phone with while our agency’s number popped up. I know exactly where we were and vividly remember the colors and smells and things surrounding us. I grabbed Sam and we rushed out of the store. I even remember the color and texture of the pavement as we hurried to sit in the privacy of our car. Then the news. Then the first picture we ever saw of our little girl! Imagine the culmination of 13 months of waiting!

Thankfully we anticipate the wait to be much, much shorter than 13 months this time around. 😅 And amazingly there are days when 2 months feels like 13. We miss the little girl we have never met, whose face we have yet to see. We can’t wait to know who she is and to welcome her into our family. 💕

Wishing you a happy beginning to Spring!

Stephanie, for the family

Another new winter experience is Amara adventuring into the world of Lego. We love seeing her determination and joy at the end result!

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…