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

The Homesteading Dream

I have always had a dream, or maybe it should be called a vision or a desire.  The desire to raise livestock and grow a garden.  Not to have a commercial farm, but to have a spread of land with enough food production to provide free healthy organic fruits, vegetables and meat to people who are in need.  Maybe even staring a foundation to support this endeavor.  But in truth I have not acted on this vision.  Maybe the lack of movement could be blamed on fear or just life happenings.  In truth I could not tell you what keep us from jumping in the farmy or homesteading community.  It was like the dream had vanished.  The dream had died!  Not the homesteading dream, but the bigger purpose behind the reason of wanting to homestead.  It just seemed that it was an afterthought.  But life has an interesting way in resurrecting dreams.  I truly believe that even in the darkest days, there is always sunshine.  It might be behind the darkest of clouds, but it is there waiting to be discovered, waiting to be basked in.  For me this sunshine was the Coronavirus.

 I know.  How could anyone list the Coronavirus as a sunshine?  The virus has caused a health crisis, schools to be closed, countries to be shutdown, jobs to be lost, businesses to fail as well as creating an additional pandemic which is the surging growth in depression including children.  In a way the pandemic affected all of us in a negative way!  But it is in these hardest of times humanity has risen above.  Mankind has overcome so many obstacles.  In a sense, I am of the same belief of which William Faulkner spoke in his Nobel Peace acceptance speech.  His context was dealing with fear of being blown up and the causes it creates in writing.  That this caused writers to forget the problems of the human heart.  That man must relearn the problems of the human heart and until he does, he would write as if he was watching the end of man.  Faulkner would say, “I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance”.  We have all endured and sacrificed in 2020.  Maybe the sunshine was just a cause of the Coronavirus.  The need of homesteading was emphasized while standing in a Kroger grocery store in April 2020 looking for food.  

The fear of the pandemic initially took the form of panic buying and that has significance for my family.  We choose to eat as much organic and GMO-free food as possible because Ansley has to eat clean food for health reasons (MTHFR, healing, detoxing, etc).  I could not simply just go pick up any piece of meat.  With stores not having the food that my family needed, we had to turn to alternative sources.  We had to go straight to the local farms, which in most cases was even more expensive.  While this was happening, I was determined to figure out a way to not be in this situation again.  How to do this? And how could we do this living on a small plot of land in the city of Memphis, TN? I know we must produce our own meat.  We need to get food production animals.  We needed chickens—for at least eggs for our daily breakfast! The truth is that we were dreaming of homesteading.  The pandemic just pushed us to dip our toes in the water.  

So in May 2020, Koen and I came home from Tractor Supply with 6 Isa Brown chicks just about a week or so old. 

Their names are Rosie, Browna, Sweetie, Snow, Daisy ,and Goldie. Our son also has had a dream of being farmer cowboy since the age of 3.  So, we are letting him get a hands-on experience in farming.  He is selling chicken eggs in warmer months.  He refers to the location as “Chicken Backyard Farms.” But in truth this is bigger than chicken eggs.  This is a step closer to homesteading and a step closer to rekindling my dream of producing food for people who are in need.    

-William

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