Adoption Grant Update

There are many organizations that will award adoption grants to qualified families. Qualifications and amounts awarded vary based on the organization.

Earlier this year, we began working on and submitting grant applications to a couple of grant organizations. Of course, not everyone, not even all qualified families receive grants but we knew it wouldn't hurt to apply. Most of these organizations receive far more applications than they could ever award grants to.

We found out a month ago that we did not receive a grant from the first organization we applied to. But today we received a notification letter from the 2nd organization stating that we had been chosen to receive an adoption grant from them!

To say we are excited and grateful is an understatement--we are so overwhelmed with the outpouring of God's provision. Receiving this grant means that the agency fees are now completely covered--we had already raised a good amount of the agency fees and this grant is the last little bit needed to finish that off.

Our next phase in the process is to now work on saving to cover finalization fees. This includes attorney fees as well as possible birthmother expenses. These costs are a little harder to calculate as they can vary based on the situation. Based on what we have been told by the agency and the attorney we have chosen, we are estimating finalization expenses to be in the vicinity of $4,000-$5,000. We already have almost $1,000 saved towards these costs. The attorney fees won't be paid until we are finalizing the adoption of our child so we have a little time to work on this goal.

Again, we thank you all for your support through this process and ask for your continued prayers!

Bake Sale Fundraiser

After a long hiatus of any active fundraising, we held a "Bake Sale Adoption Fundraiser" this past weekend. I love to bake from scratch so we set up a  Facebook event page and invited all of our local friends to order homemade honey wheat bread, cinnamon rolls and caramel pecan rolls. Yes,we taunted our friends with pictures of delicious treats. Hey, anything for the baby, right!?! ;-)

Ya'll, this fundraiser far surpassed my expectations! God really blessed our efforts. We ended up selling 30 (yes. THIRTY.) pans of sweet rolls-- 19 cinnamon and 11 caramel pecan. PLUS 9 loaves of bread. So exciting! 

This was stretched out over 2 days and I cranked out pan after pan of rolls. The second day I really got into a groove and it went even faster than the first day.

We are so grateful for this success and thank everyone who participated! It was so successful that we are planning another Bake Sale Fundraiser in August!

To date, we have raised well over half of our adoption costs. We continue praying and saving, doing some fundraising, gratefully and humbly accepting donations and praying and saving some more. We are so excited that we are starting to see the end in sight! It has been our {crazy} goal to have a debt-free adoption and it's starting to look like more of a reality.

We continue to wait to be matched with a birth mother and are excited to see how that will play out. Thanks so much for your prayers and support!