It’s been less than 2 weeks since our last update, but boy have we made some good progress! Below is another Facebook live we did to share the update, or you can read in more detail below.
But first, many of you might be wondering…
Why are we even sharing updates?
Well, we share the reason for this in the video below but we’ll sum it up because we’re never brief in our video updates :).
The basic answer is that we just love sharing our hearts and being an open book. We feel it connects us to people and in the same way that we shared our journey to becoming full-time RVers and learning the lifestyle, we’d love to serve as a resource for others.
We personally don’t have anyone in our immediate network who has recently adopted and we felt extremely clueless about the process. We hope that by sharing the journey as we are going through it and not just after we’ve gone through it, we can help other’s understand adoption more, whether it’s in their plan or not.
We’ve never regretted sharing our hearts before. It opens up the door to so many new relationships and relationships are what life is all about, in our opinion!
Plus, we just appreciate everyone’s support and want you to know what a BIG part of this journey you are!
Okay, now for the updates…
Take me directly there…
Our First Fundraiser Was a Huge Success! | We Started our Home Study | We’re Brainstorming Some Holiday FUNdraisers!
Our First Fundraiser Was a Huge Success!
Holy moly! We sold 77 Follow Your Detour T-Shirts in one week!! We can’t express our gratitude enough and we were blown away by the support we received with our very first fundraiser.
Bonfire sent us a payment of about $1,000, which we were able to immediately put towards our next big step in the process (we share about that in detail below).
THANK YOU!!
We couldn’t jump into an update without thanking everyone who purchased a t-shirt. Lindsay recently applied for a grant to help pay for the home study fees (which will cost $3,000) and we found out this week that we were not selected. So, having the $1,000 from these t-shirts was extremely helpful.
We had a few orders come in after the campaign ended, and a few emails from Bonfire saying “someone wants to buy a t-shirt, we recommend relaunching your campaign”. So we did!
We decided we will just keep the t-shirts for sale so that they can be purchased at any time! For those of you who purchased one in the first batch, they should be arriving next week!! We’d love to see you take pictures of yourselves in them and share them on social and tag us!
We Started Our Home Study!
Last week we had our first call with our consultant, Rachel. She reaffirmed our decision to go the consultant route. She was extremely helpful in laying out the process for us and helping us break it down into bite sized pieces. Plus, as an adoptive mother herself, she had lots of words of advice and encouragement.
She advised us to begin our home study process and warned us about the “slew of paperwork” that was going to be coming our way. She gave us some recommendations of home study providers in Colorado and we decided to work with Adoption Choices of Colorado.
What is a Home Study?
An adoption home study is required by law before you can adopt. It’s the approval process that verifies to adoption agencies that we are capable of providing a safe, loving space for a child. Home studies must be completed in the state you reside in and can take 2-4 months to finalize.
After filling out the initial application and paying the home study fees, we then received a long list of documents that we needed to begin gathering and signing. This check list contained 26 items and I can still hear Dan yelling “I’m drowning in paperwork!!!” as we began printing, reading, signing and stacking page after page.
Along with the typical consent, disclosure, and other legal forms we needed to sign, we had to collect and complete the following (and much more):
- A physical exam and medical history form
- Fingerprints
- Child abuse clearances
- All our life documents (birth certificates, marriage license, social security cards, etc.)
- Proof of auto and health insurance
- Financial documents (pay stubs, tax returns, monthly income and expenses, etc.)
- Pet vaccinations
- Three non-family references
In addition to the paperwork, we will need to attend 16 hours of parenting classes for foster/adoptive parents and get our CPR and First Aid Certification.
We will also meet with our assigned social worker on three different occasions. These meetings will be interviews about our journey to adoption, our childhood, our marriage, our families, etc. The visits will take place in our home, so the social worker can look around and verify that our space is safe for a child.
While it sounds really intimidating and intrusive, we’re glad to know that they do such a thorough job of ensuring the well-being of adopted children. Our fingers are crossed that the home study process goes quickly. The longest part is waiting on the FBI background checks to clear, which can take up to 90 days.
Signed, sealed, and (almost) delivered!
We’ve already made great progress with our home study. We got all the required documents together in only one week!
The only thing we have left to do are the three meetings with our social worker, the parenting classes in January, and the CPR certification. Then, of course, wait, wait and wait some more for all the processing.
Today, we’re shipping off all the documents and it feels great. Once we’re home study approved (hopefully by mid-February), we’ll be ready to be matched!! What a great way to start the new year!
Now that the paperwork is done, we can begin the fun part, which is creating a profile book of our story and photos. This will be shown to expectant mothers by the agencies we work with. No pressure to make it good, right? 🙂
At least we have PLENTY of photos from our travels and a pretty unique story to tell. Plus, it will be a fun way to pass the time as we continue along the home study process.
We’re Brainstorming Some Holiday FUNdraisers!
Stay tuned because we’ll be sharing our next fundraiser soon, just in time for the holidays! Lindsay is working on creating personalized letters from Santa Claus himself. We thought it would be a fun thing for parents to send official-looking mail from The North Pole.
Lindsay’s sisters are also crafty and are excited about the possibility of getting together to make leather earrings to sell as gift ideas! These earrings are SO cute and super trendy right now and with the right tools, are easy to make in large amounts.
We’ll of course share the details in our next update!
That’s all for now, thanks for reading and for your continued support. We’re thankful for all of you this Thanksgiving and hope you have a wonderful holiday with your loved ones.