Another Baby Todd

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

Whew. The first major effort for adopting our little girl is complete. The Home Study was officially finalized on Monday the 8th (yes, a whole 5 hours after I posted last week!). I can’t help looking at these timelines again and again. We have had such incredible people supporting us and helping us reach this point. I cannot believe we were able to complete our Home Study in 5 weeks and I cannot stop feeling a bit overwhelmed with gratitude to everyone who helped this happen.

Adoption 2020 – Application to Approved Home Study: 8 Months
Adoption 2025 – Application to Approved Home Study: 5 Weeks

With our finalized Home Study we were able to submit our first request for approval to adopt to the US Government. This normally takes 6-12 weeks and we were able to mail out our application on Friday.

I also learned that we can submit our first request for approval to adopt to India simultaneously. While I was not fully prepared for that, I had been eagerly gathering and preparing documents for that step, because that’s what I do 😁. So we are well on our way to gathering these documents as well.

One down, one to go! And then we wait.

Stephanie for the family

Enjoying our first walk of the “it isn’t 80 degrees before noon” season down here

It is complicated comparing this adoption process and timeline with our first adoption.

In late 2019 I woke up from my second endometrial removal surgery, still in the “coming out of anesthesia” room, and I knew three things:
1. This surgery actually worked
2. I would finally get to live without pain
3. It was time to start the adoption process to grow our family
On January 8th 2020, Sam and I pre-applied to begin the adoption process and were accepted into the program on January 14th.

A lot of 2020 is a blur in my mind. But I crisply remember the feelings I carried as we went through lockdowns, spoke with friends, family, and coworkers around the world, and poured ourselves into accomplishing the paperwork for adopting Amara. In the midst of everything 2020 brought the world, we had a beautiful lamp, our future daughter, to bright us hope and determination.

In spite of our speed and hard work as we worked on our first round of adoption paperwork, it wasn’t until 8 months later – August 2020 – that our Home Study was actually finalized. And guys, honestly, we weren’t lazy by any means. It just is a lot of work.

So here we are again and I am confident we have second child syndrome. Which is great by the way. We know what we are doing, what is needed, how to find the right people and complete the right appointments, and we aren’t constantly second guessing “did I do that right?” because we have been here before. And that’s just us because I won’t stop being thankful to the people who have rushed through their reporting process to deliver documents that should take 4-6 weeks and put them in our hands in days instead. These people are my heros.

Ok, ready to really compare now?

Adoption 2020 – Application to Home Study Draft: 6 Months
Adoption 2025 – Application to Home Study Draft: 3 Weeks

Adoption 2020 – Application to Approved Home Study: 8 Months
Adoption 2025 – Application to Approved Home Study: Stay tuned, fam, we are getting close!

With lots of love and gratitude,
Stephanie for the family

Throwback to 2020 Sam and Stephanie.

Happy Labor Day!

Amara is thrilled to have an extra day out of school and we are so happy for a bonus weekend day to spend together. We want to be intentional to soak up the enjoyment of these moments even though we are anticipating and excited for the future of being a family of four.

Last week we picked-up the last document required for our Home Study to be written and the initial Home Study draft is complete! I wish I could show you the pages of writting that go into the last report we needed as well as the Home Study itself. Because when I say how grateful I am for how fast people are working on behalf of our family, I feel it falls so short of expressing the amount of time these professionals have put into finishing this work in such a short amount of time. We are so, so thankful!

Now that the Home Study report is drafted, it takes a bit more time to be finalized and notarized, but it won’t be long before we can send off these documents for our first round of US approval to adopt! That will launch our next round of paperwork gathering too. So for today we are all taking a breath, being in the moment together, and resting before the next round of work arrives.

We wish you all a lovely holiday with your friends and family!

Stephanie, for the family 💕

Ok, I feel a little bit like I’m living in a dream right now. It has been exactly 21 days since we applied for approval to begin the adoption process with our agency. And guys, we have already completed everything we are required to do for finalizing our home study. This is a 2-4 month process and we are just…done! While we absolutely worked hard on our end, we are beyond grateful to the experts who squeezed us in for appointments and are rushing to finalize reports so that we can take our next step.

Right now, we are only waiting on two reports to be reviewed, approved, and finalized. Then we will be able to apply for our first US approval to adopt!

We are so excited to be flying through the parts of this process that we can fly through and are preparing ourselves for all the patience we will need in the future times of waiting.

Thanks for being with us on our journey!

The wait to adopt is a long one. In these first weeks, we have been amazed and encouraged by the kindness and excitement of the people we are depending on to complete paperwork. They make us feel like they carry the same urgency we have to finalize their part of the paperwork. We are so honored to be working with such compassionate and knowledgable people.

For Amara’s sake in waiting, we have told her she would be 8 years old before she gets to meet her sister. The entire process takes 18-24 months, and this has given her an anchor – a time she understands and can cling to with anticipation. This week has been adorably filled with questions like “Will these shoes fit me when I am 8?” She is so excited to show her sister everything she has and to share (some of) her things with her sister too. We love processing with her how life will be different when the time comes and to see Amara’s excitement and understanding grow.

Our continued efforts are focused on completing the Home Study. We have collected 90% of the paperwork, have appointments scheduled for remaining documents, and have our Home Study visits scheduled.

And as we wait, life continues on. Amara has officially returned to school and I’m sure everyone in class already knows she has a sister waiting for her in India! 💕

We are one week in to our adoption journey and by far the most repeated sentence in our home is from Amara: “I want my sister!” For How I Met Your Mother fans out there, hearing this sentence repeated feels about like listening to 500 Miles over and over on a road trip. 😊

Over the past week we have gathered nearly all the documents required to complete our home study. Our goal is to set some records for how fast we finish tasks and gather paperwork. After all, we have a little girl waiting to meet her sister and we can’t keep our daughters waiting on us!

As you think of us and pray for us in this season, the most difficult moments will be the quiet ones. The moments of waiting where it is not dependent on us to accomplish paperwork or tasks, but on other parties. Our goal during those times will be to settle into the moment, remembering this is the last season we will have with just Amara here at home. We hope we can make the time special for her as she also waits with great anticipation.

Thanks for joining us for journey! It will be a long one, but we are so glad you are in this with us.

And also.. enjoy our precious Amara and her “I want my sister” expression 😉

Ah, here we are again with a new baby blog. A year ago, we would confidently claim “one child is enough.” But our hearts have been changing. A growing love bloomed in our hearts: we have another child waiting for us.

These past three years have been an incredible journey. Becoming a family with Amara has been miraculous. Our bond has grown deep and we are so proud and amazed at the growth of our little girl. This year, Amara is six and starts first grade! Her only surprise about our news may be that we finally caught on. She has been telling us she has a sister in India since she could speak the word sister.

So here we go! We have officially begun the process of adopting our second child from India. It isn’t a decision we made lightly. The wait is long, the costs are high, and immigrating to a new country is hard. Yet three years of watching our precious daughter bloom has made this a mountain we want to climb.

We would be honored if you would consider climbing this mountain with us. The biggest hurdle we face is, once again, the finances. You can view our Funding page to learn more and consider supporting us on this journey.

Our hearts are filled with excitement. We now confidently claim “we willl be parents of two!”

More updates to come!

-Stephanie for the Family