Afternoon Update

Everything went great today! We are home and resting. I am sure we will add more details later, but here are some pictures for those not on facebook.

Tomorow is the day!

It has been too long since we posted here but it is great to come here to post good news!

Today we got "the call" from our adoption agency. There is a newborn baby girl in Lawrence, KS just waiting for us. She is going to be released from the hospital tomorrow and if all goes to plan, she will be with us tomorrow night!

This is as much a shock for us as it is for you all. This is what is know as a "fast adopt" and it was something we expressed an interest in.

It feels like we have been waiting forever, but now it all seems to be happening so fast. No 9 months waiting for us, more like 9 hours :)

So needless to say, please keep us in your hearts and prayers and say a special prayer for the birth mom who made a tough choice and is giving us such a blessing.

We will post more details and pictures here tomorrow!

J&J

Ahhh… it’s been a while. The adoption journey has been a bumpy ride. We are certainly on that roller coaster ride that we have heard so much about in our classes. We didn’t share our latest news with many until we knew more details, but now that we are over that hill & moving on to the next we are ready to share! Hold on to your hats Ladies & Gentlemen & please keep all hands inside the car! Its a wild ride :)

July 14th I received an email from my friend Bentley & then a text message telling me to go read my email. I knew it had to be important! Bentley is also in the process of adopting & actually had just returned the day before from meeting the birthmother that they are going to adopt a baby girl due in Sept!! (See adoption does work!)

The email was a forward from a “birthmother” who had contacted Bentley. He replied to her told her he had just recently been matched but asked if he could send her info to us.
She later responded & agreed. Bentley again texted messaged me & said it was a go & I could call her if I would like. My first thought was… oh great now what do I do? What do I ask, What do I say to her, I have never talked to a birth mom before….. I was sick I was so nervous. I waited until I got home to call. Once I got home I calledher. I spoke to Tiffany for about 20 minutes. In our first call she told me she was 16 weeks pregnant, she was married, she was a substitute teacher, she asked if she could come visit us here in KS, if we wanted her to deliver here or where she lived in Oh. WOW that’s a loaded question.. I still wanted to get to know her.
I asked her things like if the baby’s father knew she was considering adoption. She told me “well its not the typical pregnancy”. I said OK… not sure what was coming next.
Tiffany then told me that she was originally in a Surrogacy arrangement that went bad. She immediately said she had proof of custody of the babies that she had been to court & in the courts eyes the babies are hers & her husbands.
She said she had tried placing with an agency but that they wouldnt work with her because of the babies( I thought this was really odd)
Did you notice that… I said BABIES… with an S… As Tiffany & I talked she mentioned she was having more than one baby… even more than two babies… yep she was having TRIPLETS…. WOWZA! I don’t remember much after this point. For a few minutes all I could think of was John freaking out when I tell him that there were 3, I had to think of a cleaver way to tell him it was going to be ok & that we would figure it out. But I had to convince myself first!
I continued to talk to Tiffany she told me about her “big Greek family”, her husband Brian, more about the Surrogate story we talked like we were old friends. It wasn’t awkward or anything like I was expecting.
She wanted to call me back later because she was at work… I said that was fine… She called back & we talked later that evening for just a few minutes.
Between her calls I ran up stairs to tell John what was going on. The look on his face when I said triplets was awesome… why I didn’t bring the camera I will never know.
We spent the evening talking about finances, me staying home, triplets, praying, diapers, triplets, finances & triplets! Did I mention that we were both a bit nervous by the triplets thing? But we also booth agreed that if this was God’s plan for us then this is what we will do & we will figure the rest out later! We were doing fertility treatments there was a chance we could have had biological triplets!
The next day we(Tiffany & I) emailed back & forth & with John through out the day about various things. Just getting to know each other, nothing really exciting. She mentioned her husband was getting ready to join the military, Marines to be exact.
July 16th I started to wonder how much of this was true, it was all sinking in & I was thinking clearer (the triplets thing was wearing off). The same time John spoke to our pastor & Ken said to pray for wisdom. We definitely got the wisdom we prayed for. I found many many many posts on various websites about TiffanyM & the email address she was using to contact us. My heart sank.
The more I Google searched her name & email address the more I found. I spent several hours looking online & found enough to convince me this wasn’t real & there were plenty of people online questioning her story. We had also contacted our attorney by this point who had given us some advice & agreed that some of the things we thought were a bit suspicious were indeed red flags & typical “scammer” signs… Yes we were in the process of being scammed. We asked Tiffany for the items our attorney asked for, then we suddenly stopped hearing from her… she removed me as a friend from her MySpace page, she wouldn’t reply to text messages, phone calls, she obviously figured out that we have figured her out, or at least that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with us.

I was angry. I was so angry for a few days, lucky my husband is a better person than I am & told me that being angry at her gets us nothing. I wasn’t emotionally attached to the idea of finally being a mom to these babies yet so I wasn’t heart broken like I thought I would be but I was angry, bitterly angry.
She didn’t get money from us, she wasted some of our time but that is really all. So why am I so angry?… Adoption is complicated. It is an invasive stressful process involving lots of time, money, emotions, there are laws & policies that make it complicated. So for someone to make up a story like this makes me so angry. She is adding more complications to it than is needed. There are children waiting for loving families, there are families waiting for babies to start a family.

Then we had a sermon at church last Sunday about being angry vs being forgiving… once again I think God told Ken that I needed a talk! I so needed that sermon. I need to get over Tiffany & her fake triplet story & stop wasting my time & energy being so angry at her. I guess I am still angry about the fact that there are scammers that do this to people. But I am over our situation. I still pray for Tiffany. I have just changed my prayer for healthy pregnancy & healthy babies. I pray that she does something more productive with her life. I hope the next family is knows to research & dig as deep as they can to protect their emotions, their family & their finances.


*jennifer

Info For other adopting families.... email if you would like the links to the websites I found.
**Red flags from the many hours of research I have done & our Attorney**
An attorney who has done adoption law for 25+years.

Triplets- Very Rare! Especially with serrogate situations- the way that insemination is done its highly unlikely for triplets to happen!
Agency will not turn a birth mom away because of triplets- Our attorney said he could match her with several families in a heartbeat.
Serrogate situation as she explained it to us sounds unlikely to happen that way & for her to get custody even more unlikely.
The fact that in the first conversation she asked to come visit- she didnt know us, already she was asking to come visit? I read online that alot of times these people cash the ticket in for money & never arrive. Thats how they get your $.
She told us on day 2(less than 24 hrs of talking to us) that we were the family she wanted to work with. "the babies inside me are telling me that your the family for me" was what she said. At no time in the 2 weeks we talked to her did we ever commet to adopting the babies...

Profile Update

All,

Here is a quick update. Our adoption profile has been updated on the A&B website. It is basically a shortened version of our full profile that birth parents can view online.

Check it out and keep it in mind if you hear of any potential birth parents for us.

Otherwise we are in hurry up and wait mode :)

J&J

One More Milestone

YEA - We are finally done with MAPP class. It was a rough 10 weeks! We still have some hoops to jump through before we are certified by the state, but the longest and toughest one is over.

We met several great couples in the class. I hope we keep in touch as we all go down road together.

Next steps:

• Finish our on-line profile for A&B (This weekend)
• Pick an adoption lawyer (Soon)
  
• Take trans-racial class (Soon)
• CPR / First aid certificate (June 24)

Thanks for your continued support and prayers. We will keep you posted.

J&J

Another Update

All -

We heard some comments that we had not been updating this enough, so here is our current status :)

We finished our home study and it is all approved and blessed. We also finished our profile and dear birth mother files. They are at the printer right now and should be back tomorrow. Here is a copy of the dear birth mother letter if you are curious. (Also, feel free and share with anyone you think might be looking into adoption.)

Our next steps are to complete the MAPP class on Tuesday and finalize with the state and with with our agency. That should take a few more weeks tops then we will officially be on the waiting list. As we have shared with you all, that wait could be weeks, months or years. Your prayers for a short wait and successful match are appreciated.

That's it for now. Hopefully we will have more news soon. :)

J&J

Status Update

Hello friends and family! it has been awhile since our last update, so we thought we would let you all know where we are and our next steps.

Since we last posted, we completed our MAPP home study, it was a snap. We also have crossed the half-way point on MAPP certification having completed 6 classes with only 4 to go. The last class was focused on the adoption process (rather than foster) so it was more interesting to us.

We also spent several hours on the adoption profile and "dear birth mother" letter this weekend. Once we are done with these, we will post them here. We also will ask for your help in spreading the word and sending prospective birth mothers our way.

Here are our next steps:

• Review and approve the A&B home study document (any day now)
• Complete the adoption profile & dear birth mother letter (this week)
• Finish the MAPP classes (June 10th)
• Complete trans-racial parenting training (TBD)
• Complete the foster care certification process (TBD)

We will post again on this Sunday, if there is any news and try to post every Sunday.

Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

John & Jennifer

1 Down 1 to go!

John is out of town on business so I thought I would post to bring the blog up to date.
Our first homestudy with Adoption & Beyond went well! We met Monday afternoon & it was so much easier than I thought it was going to be. I am really happy with our choice of agencies, they have answered all of our questions, they staff is awesome & has told us each step of the way exactly how things will happen. (& so far they have happen as planned!)
Everything is moving along much faster than we expected. We will get the final copy of the homestudy this week & then its official! We have a small amount of paper work left & then we are ready to be matched with a birth mother. Now for the fun part.... we wait. I am not good about waiting for anything so I know for me this is going to be hard.

Thank you all for your prayers, well wishes & joining us on this journey of growing our family!
Jennifer & John

1st Homestudy

Our MAPPS homestudy has been moved back to May 9th, due to the storms we had here in KS last night. Our A&B homestudy is still scheduled for Monday.

J&J

Our adoption story so far.

Hi friends and family!

Jennifer and I have created this blog to help keep you all posted on our growing family. As you all know we have embraced adoption as God's plan for us and we are moving forward with the process. We are going to keep this blog to help document the process for you all and for our future son or daughter. :)

Both Jennifer and I will post here, but I am going to get it started with a summary of what we have done so far.

Jennifer and I have been talking about adoption for a couple of years. I personally knew I wanted to adopt for years. My mom spent some time in the foster care system as a child and my step-dad was adopted. Additional, my family had several foster kids stay with us as I was growing up, so you could say that I "have a heart for adoption." Jennifer is going to be such a good mom. Anyone who really knows her, knows that fact and I am so happy that we have chosen this path.

So here is how we got where we are. We kicked off this process on 3/20/08 when we met with our adoption agency, Adoption and Beyond (A&B.) We picked this agency based on our research and the recommendations of friends who have worked with them in the past. When we first looked into adoption about two years ago, we had also singled out A&B so it seems that our path keeps coming back to them.

We went to a meeting with Steffany, the executive director and talked about our adoption plans. We briefly talked about our goals and quickly focused on domestic adoption. (We have nothing against international adoption, but with plenty of children needing homes here in the U.S. this seemed to be the logical answer to us. )

Some families are very specific in their adoption requests. The may specify a race or gender or may even be more specific in their plan to build a family. Those kinds of distinctions never came into our mind. We believe that God has already matched us to our child and the process will work as it was intended. This is good for us on two fronts. First, it takes stress off your life when you stop pushing against his plan and second we are more likely to find a good match relativly quickly.

The only stipulation we made is we want a healthy infant. I think we really want the whole childhood experience (please remind us about this when we complain about being up all night with a crying baby.) :) Other than that we are very open and anxious to move forward.

The process starts off with completing a home study application. For those of you who are new to the process, I would describe it is a spiritual and psychological enema. It is intrusive, thought provoking and exhausting. The whole thing was about 50 pages including 2, 10+ page autobiographies and an extensive KBI and FBI background checks. The whole process took us about four weeks to complete and we submitted the document to A&B on 04/18/08, our 5th anniversary!

We also started taking a 10 week class through the state called MAPP. This class is the first step to be approved to become adoptive or foster parents through the state. The classes are every Tuesday night from 04/08/08 - 06/10/08. We decided to go through this process to keep our options open. We are primarily interested in the fost-adopt process. This is where the state places a child in need with a family when they are 90% sure that parental rights will be severed in the future.

I think Jennifer and I both have mixed feelings about the MAPP class. As you can imagine, anything done though the state is bureaucratic and involves even more paperwork. Additionally these classes can be emotionally exhausting as we learn about some of the challenges children in State custody have gone though and how to best help them.

As I hear about these children, I know they need good homes too. It pains me to think about how alone they must feel. I'd like to think at some point our family will be strong enough to be an advocate for these children, so we are keeping an open mind and heart, but we are pretty sure this is not the right option for us today. With that being said, the classes have been very informative so far and we have met several other couples I hope we maintain friendships with. I also have been impressed with the instructors. They have shown me that the people who toil "in the system" are filled with compassion and work diligently to do what is best for these children.

So that about wraps up where we are today. Our next steps are completion of the MAPP classes and the home study for both A&B and MAPP. We actually have home visits scheduled for both groups in the next 10 days. Out MAPP coordinator is scheduled to visit us on 05/02/08 and our A&B visit is scheduled for 05/05/08. These "visits" are designed to help prove that we have a suitable environment for our child and to let the observer ask any questions they may have.

Naturally we are a little anxious about the visits and will be cleaning like crazy for the next few days. Every book we have read said this is silly to do, but I am sure everyone does it. Can you imagine having to go through this level of scrutiny before you had children? The best advice I read on this was from A&B who suggested we just keep a good attitude and accept it as a necessary part of the process. :)

Well - that is the longest blog post I have ever written but that is our story so far. Look for more (and shorter) updates after our home study.

John