Another Baby Todd

We interrupt our previously scheduled Creativity Update with this important message… (I totally wrote it in that voice, guys).

Hello, hello! I am so excited to write this post today. You guys know that we have been working really hard to save our pennies by any means. In fact, I hold saving money as one of my jobs because I don’t have an income (work from home, ammiright?). Another job I have taken on during this adoption is applying for grants. It is a surprising amount of writing and paperwork!

Some Grants have not come through, others are pending, and others still require us to be matched before we can even apply. While we hold on to hope and keep putting forward the effort, the reality is, costs are adding up now. With that..

I am so honored to share that we have been offered a Matching Gift of up to $2,500 to help!

Our next step in the adoption process is being matched with our kiddo and as soon as we are matched, we owe our next big payment of $5,000. This matching gift, with your help, could help us cover the entire expense and give us the boost we need as we apply and wait for decisions from grants who want to see that we are already matched!

Have you met fiercely independent Stephanie? 🙃 Asking you to join us financially is not my strongest strength. However, receiving this matching gift is a really exciting way that our family can meet the financial needs facing us.. and.. in order to earn those matching funds, we really do need your help!

Your gift will be matched dollar for dollar, but we are only eligible to raise funds through February 28th. We are also so happy to share that we have a platform where any gift given will be tax-deductible. So! If you are able to join us on the financial side of this journey, feel free to follow the link below:

PureCharity: https://purecharity.com/another-baby-todd

Thank you, thank you, thank you for considering a gift to help our family earn matching funds! And stay tuned next week as we return to our Creativity Project Updates!! 😁💕

The total cost to adopt from India is $40,000-$50,000. So far we have covered half of those expenses. For more information on the costs associated with adoption, please feel free to visit our agency’s website: https://www.awaa.org/india-adoption#cost

Sneak Preview of our painting efforts…

Happiest of Mondays to you!

No news on the adoption front, but as you know, this is waiting time. We can’t wait for the call that will introduce us to our baby girl! 😁

In the meantime…

Preparations continue at our house as we dream of New Baby Todd joining our family. Even without knowing her age, there is plenty we know she will need, and wow are there a lot of people in the community passing on or selling little kid things! We have been amazed by the amount we can save if we plan ahead, have patience, and stay persistent.

Two of our BEST deals are sitting in the garage right now (do deals get better than free for pick-up, guys?). They require a little bit of TLC – but we have time to invest and are so excited to share the results with you!

Stay tuned for before and after pictures!

Another Monday, another week of waiting. As time goes on, it feels like the intensity of waiting grows. Knowing that the next step means seeing our daughter’s face for the first time is a really big deal! And now that the busy holiday season is behind us, we feel the intensity more and more. Checking the mailbox daily has been replaced by keeping our phones on loud, loud, loud alert with each incoming SPAM call causing a minor heart attack 😉

Preparing our home for our future baby girl is one of the most fulfilling parts of waiting. Throughout this adoption our finances look very different. We are now on one income and everything is just a lot more expensive than it was three years ago! Whew. But as told to me by a friend: creativity loves constraints. And we have genuinely had fun being creative within our constraints!

Our first creative project started in the kitchen. We knew more plates, bowls, and utinsels were needed for our growing family and found some amazing deals at thrift stores! But space in the kitchen was already tight as is our budget. So off we went on a Marketplace Quest, finding a perfectly sized cabinet for a perfectly sized price. 😁 Combined with our own storage we made a perfect new space in our kitchen for all of our kiddos’ needs!

Baby girl, our kitchen is ready and waiting for you!! (Amara loves it too!!)

It has been another exciting week for our little household. Amara is now 7 years old and after celebrating at home she was excited to head back to school to celebrate with her friends.

If that wasn’t exciting enough, we also received our US Approval to adopt which means we are officially on the waiting list to be matched with our baby girl! We know that there are many families waiting who entered the process ahead of us, but we are already so excited and eager to see our little girl’s face for the first time!

There is still very little for us to actionably do on the adoption side of things. Until we have a match we do not have additional paperwork to gather and many of the grant programs available to us also would like us to have a match before we apply. So that leaves us with – (im)patiently waiting! 😁 We can handle this, right? Right.

Happiest of birthdays to our precious Amara!

Hello! We are officially back from a wonderful holiday season and so excited to see what the New Year has for us as we continue our adoption journey. Being in a season of waiting is hard, but it was a bonus gift to wait through the holidays. The busy season was a helpful distraction and we had a couple precious gifts to help us celebrate in a special way this year!

Our first incredible gift was the opportunity to travel to India! Not only did we get to share the holiday season with friends who live in India, we also got to visit the place where we met Amara and people who loved and cared for Amara before we met her. Words cannot begin to express our gratitude for the chance to return to Amara’s birth country, experiencing life where her life began and our future daughter’s begins as well.

Sitting in the car as we drove back to the airport for our return journey was hard for all of us. As we felt the sadness of our trip ending we received another incredible gift: news that approval arrived from India to continue our adoption journey! Now we wait for our US approval to arrive. Once we receive our US approval, we will officially be waiting to be matched with our future daughter!

The journey ahead is still long. We will have to wait to be matched with our daughter. Wait for court approvals. Wait for immigration documents. And I’m sure many other waiting steps along the way. But our hearts are filled with gratitude for what this holiday season has meant to our family and hope for all that the New Year will bring.

Wishing you all the best in this New Year!

Stephanie, for the family

Hello, hello! It has been a few weeks, and there is very little to report from an adoption perspective. We continue to wait (im)patiently for approval from the US and India to adopt. All standard/normal/expected timelines tell us that the wait will be a while longer. Don’t worry, we still check our mail every day and can’t wait to tell you when those approvals come through! 😉

In the meantime, holiday season has been a gift in so many ways. Not only is it so much fun to prepare and celebrate, the busyness has been a wonderful distraction. I know so many can relate to the heartache of waiting to have your child in your arms and knowing there is no control over the timing of that moment arriving. We feel so fortunate that this window of waiting is happening during such a busy season.

I plan to take another short break from updating you on our adoption progress. Plan on my return in early January! And of course if any big news comes through before then, I will very, very excitedly jump online to share.

We wish all of you a very happy and precious holiday season! See you in 2026!!

One requirement for adoptive parents is participation in a significant amount of training. While some of the training is curated and required, there is truly an endless amount of knowledge for parents to collect. In these moments, where our only “adoption job” is to wait for approvals, I love to fill my time with podcasts, vlogs, and books.

We could easily fall into a false sense of preparedness. We have experience. We’ve been through this before. But every child is unique and every early life experience is unique. The tools and skills we have practiced may not help our second child feel safe and loved like they helped our first kiddo. It has been invaluable to return to old resources and have our memories refreshed and it has been exciting to find new resources and begin practicing new skills as we wait for our family to grow.

Learning is an endless adventure. We can’t wait to meet our little girl, to get to know her personality, and to see which skills and resources will best meet her needs and support her as she grows.

Just a short post this week. No news on the adoption front. Still waiting on US and India’s approval to adopt, but this is all within the normal waiting period.

In the meantime, Happy Halloween! We had a blast trick-or-treating this year with Princess Jasmine (from the live action, yo!) 😉💕

As a person prepares to adopt, there are many, many, many warnings given to them about all the waiting: waiting because things take time, waiting because there are unexpected delays, waiting because we don’t even know why we are waiting right now. Lots and lots of waiting.

Sam and I had been married for nearly 10 years before we met Amara. For us, it was long enough. We had so many cherished years as a couple and we were ready for a third little family member. Still.. being independent, child-free, and dual-income left us with such a unique season of freedom. So even though the wait was hard, we cherished every single moment that the two of us had together.

Adopting our second child is an incredibly different experience of waiting. It is hard to describe how different it feels. What I can express is that some things are more painful while others are less, some things fill us with more fear while other fears are completely gone, and with three hearts longing for this fourth little family member, the sadness of waiting rotates between all of us.

What stays the same is our principle on waiting. It has been long enough. We are ready to be a family of four. But this season of waiting is a unique season – our last season of being a family of three. So while the wait is hard, we will cherish every moment the three of us have together.

Wishing you all a happy, cherished Monday!

Stephanie, for the family

We had a lot to celebrate this week with Diwali approaching and confirmation that we are officially registered with India requesting permission to adopt! 🥳

There is very little for us to do at this stage of the adoption process. Paperwork gathering is on hold until approval is received from both the US and India. This is our first big waiting point in the process. However, with winter holidays approaching we know life will be plenty busy. In fact we already celebrated our first big holiday of the season!

Amara had so much fun helping us decorate with diyas and rangoli. We ate delicious food and got to light one sparkler before the rain sent us inside. 😁 We will have to save the rest of our fireworks for another day.

Happy Diwali!