June Adoption Update!

With adoption, there’s a lot of “HURRY UP” and then “WAITING.” It has been quite the whirlwind  the last few months with some ups and downs and more hoops to go through and waiting than  we thought! Finishing the home study and dossier deadline literally became a second job for us,  so many things had to be put “on hold” for a season, one being this blog! But we’re thankful  we’re in a “waiting time” right now and can jump back on our blog and start sharing a lot of  content here again! :) 

Several things to update on… 

Home Study & Dossier— 

Our home study was completed and approved in March! Yay!! Then we had until May 14th to  complete the dossier (international adoption file with home study, lots and lots of paperwork,  and immigration approval included).  

Some things we worked on since March: 

-I created a 6 page photo collage showing our family, pets, house, yard, family, and friends, and  photos of us doing things we like to do as a family. This is for the adoption agency board to review along with the dossier and video. 

- We created a video tour of our home and introducing ourselves for the adoption agency board in South America. 

- FBI background and fingerprints 

- William and I both had a psychological evaluation and report clearance from a psychologist  proving we weren't crazy people. Haha! This evaluation is just standard for each adopting family  for the country we’re adopting from.  

- 3 recommendation letters from friends 

- We applied for USCIS immigration approval to adopt mid-April. 

- We received all of our passports at the end of March. 

- We had two separate applications forms for the South American country’s adoption agency  and their government immigration clearance. 

- We wrote a post adopt letter. 

- William and I went the the local immigration office (Homeland Security) to get fingerprinted for them. Yes, we have had a total of 3 sets of fingerprints since January! Haha! - MOST of the paperwork or like birth certificates and marriage license, medial clearance, etc.  all had to be notarized, then certified by the county clerks, and the apostilled. Apostilled was a  new vocabulary word for us! It is a special seal that certifies foreign documents. And it has to  be done at the state capitol or Washington, D.C. UPS became our best friends! :)  

So, now we are just waiting on USCIS immigration clearance which can take 8-12 weeks. We’re  coming up on the 8 week mark this week, so we should hear back within the next few weeks!  

Travel— 

I know a lot of you are asking if we have travel dates yet, next steps, etc. With USCIS  immigration taking 8-12 weeks for our I800-A papers to be accepted and cleared, and then after  hat these immigration approval papers will go into our dossier. Next, an official referral phase  can take 4-6 weeks. Then upon accepting country’s official referral she said travel time could be  around 4 months out from that right now. So...now we’re looking at September for the  earliest...possibly October.

That’s a very brief summary but I assure you there’s A LOT more work and details in all of that.  Haha! We were really hoping to go this summer but we are trusting God’s perfect timing!! It’s so hard to know when everything exactly will be as a timeline is fluid with international  adoption! Both countries agreeing and have their own processing times, etc. The good news is, after the official referral acceptance (we are in a soft referral meaning we have given the country  our letter of intent to adopt 2 waiting children), then we can Skype video call them!!! We’re  thankful that Maritza and Moises from our Hispanic church family have agreed to help us with  translations in these video calls! Even though we are quickly learning Spanish, we don’t want to  spend a lot of time figuring out what all they are saying to us as these Skype calls will be brief  10-15 minutes!  

Spanish— 

We are continuing Spanish tutoring through the summer with Koen’s Spanish teacher who is  from South America and has 25+ years teaching Spanish and ESL. She will also be helping our  new kiddos with ESL, too! Since our “Tyler” and “Jess” do not know any English yet and will  have only had a short amount of time with ESL lessons shortly before we arrive in country, we  feel it’s really important for us to learn Spanish as much as we can before we arrive in South  America. We want to be confident in communicating with the kids and also around the town we  will be living in for 3-8 weeks.  

Since the beginning of May, we have started going to the Spanish-speaking Bible classes on  Sunday nights and Wednesday nights so we can get familiar with being immersed in the  Spanish language and also to build relationships with the Hispanic members at church. They are  all so encouraging and looking forward to meeting and loving on our new kiddos! We are very  grateful to them for their love and support! Our intent is for our home to be bilingual indefinitely!  We feel like the kids’ first language is part of their identity and we do not want to take that away  from them. Our goal is for all 5 of us to become fluent in Spanish and English! 

Fundraising— 

March, April, and May were amazing fundraisers to finish our goal of raising enough funds for our dossier fee. We reached our goal!! We are VERY grateful to each one who donated funds to reach this goal with us! Thank you!! 

March fundraisers:  

Matilda Jane & Noonday Jewelry 

Our sweet friends Moriah McCrary (Matilda Jane) and Melissa Jennings (NoonDay jewelry) did  adoption fundraiser shows for us! $266 was raised with that and went straight to our dossier fee!  Thank you so much ladies!! 

Egg My Yard for Easter  

“Egg My Yard” fundraiser went great! We “egged” 23 houses and over 1,100 eggs and raised  $825 that went straight into our dossier fund! A HUGE THANK YOU to each of you who gave  funds to purchase items for it or donated candy, small toys, and eggs—because of you, we were  able to put all of the sponsor donations straight into our dossier fee! And another HUGE  THANK YOU to all of the parents and “surprise Easter Bunnies” who sponsored another family’s  yard—thank you for supporting us and letting us have some fun for your kids! We really hope  they loved it!!

April Fundraiser: 

Bake sale- Bakin’ for Dough 

College friends Kathryne Guinn and Cayla Slater organized and hosted a virtual bake sale.  They do these as a service gift fundraiser to adopting families! There were several bakers for this event who donated many different baked goods! We’re so thankful for all of their time and  talent! They raised $721 which all went straight into our dossier fund! This was a HUGE blessing  for us for friends to volunteer to organize and execute a successful fundraiser for us in April, while we were incredibly busy (and tired many days) finishing up last minute dossier paperwork  and appointments! 

May fundraiser:  

Virtual 5K on May 1st, A Home for Jolee Foundation Grant $5,000.00  

This is a yearly event every May! We plan on making this an annual event for our family to  support other adopting families, and we encourage you to do the same! :)  You can click here to register: www.ahomeforjolee.org/fundraisers 

Funds Update—our personal funds so far: $8,650 

Fundraisers and AHFJ Grant: $12,000 

Remaining estimated total cost: $28,950 

Our next big fee is the referral fee $10,100 + extra sibling fee $5,000 + Kidsave Family fee  $2,000 = $17,100—this amount is due in full upon accepting the official referral. We estimate  this could be as early as July, So far we have $6,400.00 of this total. 

After these fees we will still have more agency and in-country processing fees, travel costs for  all 5 of us, adoption court fees, and visas and passports for “Tyler” and “Jess.” 

We are praying hard that we will be awarded several grants! There’s no guarantee as there are  A LOT of families applying for these grants! Most of these take up to 60 days or more to review  and receive funding. Please pray abundance over these grants we have applied for in May and June: 

- our adoption agency’s foundation grant 

- Show Hope 

- Life Song (this one offers a matching grant for up to the amount we have already fundraised!!)

- Gift of Adoption (this one covers travel costs, and is awarded the month of travel!!) 

Again, thank you for your continued prayers, encouragement, and support! You guys are lifting  us up through this whole process! The Lord is giving us strength and guiding us in daily  surrender to His plan and perfect timing! Those of our adoption-family friends will agree with us  when we say this process is not for the faint of heart! Deepened faith, perseverance, grit,  patience, and love are grown in the process! It is beautifully messy! It takes a lot of time, mental,  and emotional sacrifice. Will it be worth it? Absolutely! 

By the way, as much as we would LOVE to share their photo with you here on our blog, we  signed a privacy agreement with our agency that we cannot share their photo on social media or  websites until the adoption is final. However! If we are visiting in person, I will gladly show you  their photo from my phone, just ask! They are so cute!  

With much love,

William and Ansley Tingle

Adoption Update!

February 21, 2021 - the last 7-8 weeks have been extremely busy with getting as much of our home study and dossier (aka HUGE paperwork file for international adoption) as quickly as possible!!

When we wrote our letter of intent to adopt to the children’s home country in September, we then had a deadline of 8 months to complete our home study and dossier, and for it to reach the home country in Spanish translation. Our goal is to have the home study completed by the first week of March so we can apply for USCIS (United State Citizenship and Immigration Service) approval—our home study has to go into this government document. This government department is responsible for determining eligibility of parents to adopt and the children to be immigrated. This general takes about 2 months to come back, but we’re praying for less! Then both of the home study report, copies of our passports, and USCIS approval will go into the dossier. Then, everyone can review it and it can be translated into Spanish ASAP. We are praying it will all be in the country by the 8 months deadline!

We are 50% finished with our eAdopt home study file and about half way with our dossier, too!! This is what we have completed so far:

-Application 

-Orientation Training with our agency

-Written a Letter of Intent to the country stating that we want to adopt both kids, along with a PDF of photos of our family and home

-read required article readings on adoption-

-sent off and have received new copies of all of our birth certificates and our marriage license and they are notarized and apostilled 

-All 3 Passports have been mailed off and are currently in the processing phase

-All 3 of us have had medical examination clearance appointments and all passed

-2 interviews with parents who adopted from international countries and interview reports submitted

-Personality Analysis online assessment for William and Ansley

-Background checks and fingerprints

-Autobiographies of William and Ansley

-Questionnaires and other miscellaneous forms

-Completed 2 Hague Parent Training courses (3 more to go!)

-Additional 2 hour training with our social worker

-We’re all learning Spanish, too! This Spring semester, Koen and I have a private homeschool tutor who is from South America!

We still have a couple more meetings to go, including our home study visit, which has been rescheduled twice because of the ice and snow we got this week in Tennessee. Hopefully that will happen in the first week of March now! We also have 3 more Hague courses to finish, finish all 3 resource books plus book reports, additional country of origin readings, and a little bit more paperwork. Plus, praying our passports get back before the end of March!!

Our plan to cover the needed funds of this adoption is a mixture of our personal funds for the upfront costs, fundraising for the dossier in this middle phase, and apply for and hopefully receive several grants once our home study is completed. Many grants require a home study report before application can be submitted, and sometimes it can take a month or two to receive these funds. So, we are still fundraising in this middle phase to cover the cost of the USCIS approval and dossier.  In total, the adoption will cost approximately $58,000 including travel expenses for all 5 of us.  We have personally invested around $7,000 into the adoption so far to cover the up front cost of the application and orientation fees, expedited passports and medical evaluations for all of us, Hague training courses, resources, upfront beginning home study fees, and other miscellaneous costs. We have also raised a total of $5,438 to go towards the dossier. We are deeply grateful for those who have donated and sponsored our 2 fundraisers so far!! Once the dossier is completed and submitted, we will have to pay $10,000. The USCIS approval is around $900. We will have a few more fundraisers in March to finish covering these two costs! We also have a tax-deductible donation link here: 

https://adopttogether.org/families/?fundraiser=2-countries-1-family-a-new-adventure 

A few of our friends have asked us about adoption as they’re considering it. Maybe as you’re reading this, you’re also considering it. And even for those who haven’t considered it but would like to know good resources about the topic, here are 6 that we have found very helpful so far! 

The top 3 books in the photo are for our home study and dossier book reports.

The Whole-Brain Child: This book has been on my “to-read list” for a few years now. I’m super excited that our social worker approved it as one of our book reports! Thank you Carol Fennell Unrine for letting us borrow this and recommending it! This book is great to understand children’s behaviors and 12 strategies to help them with nurturing and developing.

 The Connected Child: So while this is geared towards parents of foster and adopted kids, honestly William and I both believe every parent and educator needs to read this book!! I know I could have greatly benefited from reading it when I taught first grade as I taught many kids who were from dysfunctional families, troubled or a hard emotional background, or with special behavioral or emotional needs. The strategy tools and techniques that this book shares to help these types of kids is a HUGE perspective change and teaches you how to connect and bond and develop trust with the child. We will talk more about this book in-depth in another post soon! Just note: if you have a child with emotional or behavioral needs or you are a family member or close friend with this type of child, or you’re an educator, we highly recommend getting this book and reading it!!

 Are Those Your Kids?: This book was on our list to choose from our agency’s book report list. It’s a great one to read about many different families who have adopted internationally and how they answer this question. We will share more on this topic later also because it’s one that gets asked a lot nonchalantly but it can be very hurtful to ask this question in front of adopted kids from another country. 

The last 3 books are just very good resources for adoption in general about financing, questions to ask, and emotional support.

 You Can Adopt Without Debt: Thanks to our sweet cousins Richard and Glyn McKay for sending us this good resource! (Side note: please pray for them too as they’re in the process of adopting a domestic newborn baby!!) This book has been so helpful!! Yes, adoption, especially international and for more than one child, can be very costly. But there are MANY grants out there—many of them require a completed home study first, but once that is finished then there are many to apply for and receive! This is our plan after our home study is completed! There are also a few grants that will give 0% interest loans as well! It also gives you fundraising ideas, including things to sell or make to bridge the gap. 

 Before You Adopt: This was a good resource recommended to us by Richard and Glyn also and had MANY questions for you to go through and discuss and pray over if you’re considering adoption. It talks about the many avenues to adopt—expectations, general questions, becoming a multicultural family, foster care, private domestic adoption, international adoption, embryo adoption, and finding the right agency. Note: if you’re seriously considering adoption and would like to know what agency we are using that does all of these types of adoptions, send me a text and I’d be happy to share that privately. Our adoption agency and home study agency have both been very kind, professional, and organized! 

 Calm, Cool, and Connected-An Essential Oil Guide for Foster/Adoptive Families:  We love using Young Living essential oils for everyday life, but we started using them for emotional support after our miscarriage almost 8 years ago! They have truly been life-changing and we’re humbled and deeply grateful we have these wellness tools for our kids to help them process and release emotions, especially during the times of transition and grief waves. So, I was super excited to see a Young Living oils momma, Amy Hancock, who after 4 years decided to share specific oily routines for morning and bedtime, and fun positive sensory recipes she used successfully with her kids. She even references The Connected Child book also and I thought that was really awesome!

All of these books are available on Amazon or most retail bookstores, and some might be gently used at Thiftbooks.com 

Please continue to pray for our journey—thank you! ️

William and Ansley

Two Countries, One Family: a New Adventure

In early summer this year, I kept asking the Lord a question most days. God, you have clearly given me a second chance at life for a reason (Read the last blog post here to understand what I mean by second chance).

God, what do You REALLY want me to do with my life? I feel SO deeply thankful and my heart is full just being William’s wife and Koen’s mommy, but I have this feeling you have even more for us…? What is it? He answered that question when I opened an email on the last Wednesday of July and I saw two photos of 2 sweet kids who needed a loving home.

When we were first married, we were not sure if I could have babies because of some health issues at the time, and my congenital heart defects. So the topic of adoption came up and we said if God ever had this in our plan down the road, that we wanted it to be international. 

We have both loved learning about and experiencing other countries and cultures since before we were married and throughout our marriage. Something else we considered many years ago was being short or long term missionaries. We even took a survey trip to New Zealand in 2010. And even though we loved the country and the people, God showed us that was not His plan. We didn’t understand at the time, but we do now. And we have recently learned, international adoptions have drastically gone down within the last decade, mainly because of the length and depth of a very long process. 

So fast forward about 8 years when I Google searched for international adoption agencies. I signed up to receive one agency’s weekly emails and for over a year they came into my email box—some opened and some not. Until the last Wednesday in July this year, I opened one. I saw two sweet faces—a brother and a sister—who melted my heart. I felt something stir inside me, almost like a magnet drawing me to them. So I immediately forwarded the email to William. He replied with—what does this mean?! Ha! See, when we’d talked about adoption over the years, our plans were always to adopt a baby from another country. But we know now, God’s plans are ALWAYS better than our own. He sees the BIG picture, and knows what is BEST for us! 

So, we sent an email to the contact agent that evening, and she replied the next morning with the kids’ files. We read the over the pages of detailed files and prayed over all of this for almost 3 weeks, and asked a few close friends to pray intentionally with us, too. The Lord clearly showed us multiple times that we were meant to adopt these two siblings. So we went forward with the initial application, orientation, letter of intent to adopt to the country of origin, etc. over the next few months. There are a million steps to international adoption—and every country’s requirements are different. We are now in the “long middle” phase of beginning our home study and dossier. This can take 3-5 months of collecting documents, appointments, home study visits, adoption parenting certified education and trainings, etc. Once this phase is completed, the dossier paperwork will be submitted to the U.S. Government and the South American country for approval. After the approval, the South American country will make a reference for the children, and invite us to go to the country. Then, we will stay in the country with the children (and Koen is going with us) for 3-4 weeks. During this time we will go to adoption court, go to the US Embassy for the children to become US citizens, and then travel back home. We will have a lot of resources upon coming back home to help the kids transition into life here, as well as several post-adoption home study visits for the next 2 years.  

Our agency has very specific rules put up as privacy protection for the children. We are not allowed to share publicly what country we are adopting from, nor their real names or any personal details of their story at this time. After the adoption, we will be able to share the country and the children’s real names. For now, we will refer to them as “Tyler” and “Jess.”

Why? Why are we doing this big, scary out of the box adventure? Three simple reasons. 

1-God is leading us to this for some big purpose that’s HIS purpose, and bigger than ourselves. We trust Him and surrender to His plan for our lives. This is the mission work He has called us to do.

2-To be one for someone. At Young Living Essential Oil’s convention in 2020, the focus was “Be one for someone” in advocating for the many direct charities that the Young Living Foundation sponsors. But this can be in anyone’s life, especially children.

When I taught first grade for many years, I could tell the impact that just ONE positive role model or mentor had for my students—it made a difference! Matthew West has a song “Do Something” in which he is saying that people see others in need and asking God, why won’t someone DO SOMETHING?! Then by the end of the song, he’s had humility poured over him and realizes, I (ME) need to be the one to DO something! We both have a passion for ministering to others, especially children, and make a difference in others’ lives!

3–To leave a legacy. The humble feeling that you have unselfishly forever changed the life of one or more people, to guide your family to the Lord is worthy and priceless and giving God all of the glory! These kids will hear the message of Jesus, and have the hope of Heaven.

We would be humbled and appreciative of your prayers, love, and support! We see this as the mission work God has called us to live out! 

Some specific prayers—

—for the whole international adoption process to be smooth with processing times and travel without restrictions

—for the kids, “Tyler” (11) and “Jess” (8), that they will transition well and feel joy and love, their courage and trust would be strong, that God would comfort them in their grief of leaving their foster family and home country, and that they would be able to learn English with ease. 

—for mental and emotional strength as we go through specific international parental education courses and as all three of us learn Spanish in the next few months.

—that God will abundantly bless our family financially in following this mission both in adoption fees and immediate needs of the children upon bringing them home. 

With this mission, it would be very beneficial for our friends and family to join our support team! If you feel led to help, these are some ways we have thought of so far:

—volunteer your time, skills, or talents in helping organize fundraisers and bake or make items to sell for fundraisers

—if you can speak Spanish, welcoming “Tyler” and “Jess” home and volunteering to befriend them and make them feel loved and wanted in their own language as they transition to speak English.

—donate items like gently used clothing and shoes

—give financially—2 options: 

• donate directly through PayPal or Venmo; 

• donate using this adoption funds organizations which is tax deductible (has a small fee for credit card processing)
  

PayPal or Venmo: tingleadoption@gmail.com

Link: https://adopttogether.org/families/?fundraiser=2-countries-1-family-a-new-adventure 

We’re also having a kick-off fundraiser! Read the graphic below for info on how to participate and please share!

We hope that by inviting you into this process, you will see yourself as part of the community we hope to build around our children as they grow up. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at tingleadoption@gmail.com. And if you wish to be a part of our private Facebook group to follow along on more details of our journey, send us an email, IG or FB message, then I will add you to the group.

Thank you for your love and prayers, they truly mean a lot to us!

William and Ansley