As we move into Thanksgiving this week, I woke up this morning with the desire to share with you where we are currently at in our adoption process. We began this journey back in January and have been slowly, steadily continuing down this road all year long. As you can imagine, it’s a long, involved process filled with baby steps. Many people regularly check in with us asking how things are moving. We are so very appreciative of your excitement and support of us through it all.
I feel like in recent months we have not communicated a lot of details. This has been intentional and I want to explain why. At the end of August, we were contacted by our agency and presented a set of siblingsĀ to consider. We read every detail of the files we were given, talked to family, and spent time in prayer over this decision. After a few days we decided yes, we would love to open our hearts and home to these girls.
This opportunity and our decision actually came ahead of the typical order of approval we needed. This means, that once we said yes, there has been a scurry of paperwork and approval requests that had to happen to get us approved for this match. Over the past few months we have been waiting on several key pre-approvals which recently came. Bottom line, we are now officially approved to be considered for approval! You read that right, we still have to wait for more approvals. š
During this time, we have not been sharing publicly information about the exact children we are being looked at closely and we want to be respectful of this process.
But things are progressing nicely and our current expectation is that our match approval from the Philippines will come through in the next month or so. At that time, our final funds will be due. Then a few more months of immigration and paperwork issues and we will be cleared to travel! So about 4-6 more months till we bring them home.
The next chunk of funds that we will need VERY soon is an additional $12,400. I mention this to say, if you were considering supporting this adoption, now would be the time we could use your help. We have been speechlessly blessed with every bit of support we have received to date and confidently look to the Lord to provide. We are also both working hard to earn the money and use it wisely as well.
This holiday season our future family is on my mind. We pray over these childrenĀ and in this new year, we expect our home to grow!
Thank you for being our friends and may your Thanksgiving week be filled with peace and joy,
Karena and Courtney