Our Home Study Application is Almost Complete!
We’re really excited to get moving on this adoption process, but at the same time, we want to be sure we’re ready to go and committed to all this entails. By the way, this post is about the process so far and the costs. We’ve been asked by quite few people to ‘please tell them what we’ve learned so far.’ So, here goes!
We’ve Been Doing a Lot of Research on…
…what we’ll need to do to get ready for our home study. Some of these things include getting physicals establishing our health, checking out all the fire safety/carbon monoxide equipment in the home and replacing anything that’s out of date or non-existent. We’re going to need to make sure that we have all necessary official documentation for each member of the family that states we really are who we say we are! We need to peruse the IDPH Recall list to be sure that none of our children’s items are on that list. We need to sign up to have a landline at our residence and buy a wired phone! We’ll probably need to do CPR classes and other necessary training. We need to get a certificate of inoculation for our cat. We need to double check that all toxic household supplies, batteries, dangerous tools and medication is in a ‘safe place.’ We even need to have a written Fire Safety Evacuation Plan.
There’s so much to do and I don’t know, do we do it before the home study or wait until our social worker asks for these things? But we should probably just turn in the Application for Services with our home study agency as our first step. This leads to another question.
How/When Do We Finance this Momentous Event?
Options include: 1) Pay for it all ourselves, somehow. 2) Pay for it ourselves along with the help of grants or scholarships. 3) Pay for it ourselves along with grants/scholarships and fundraising or donations. We’d like to do the third option. I’d like to trust that God will provide all the funding we need somehow and in someway. I’m sure He will, but the path to that is unknown. As we’re getting ready to send in our application, we’ll have to pay a non-refundable application fee of $300 and then before the completion of the home study, another $2,150.
When Is the Responsible and Ethical Time to Begin Fundraising for an Adoption?
Do we start raising funds before or after an approved home study? We want to be sure that as soon as we get this ‘ball rolling’ we’ll be on our way to having the entire adoption funded through to finalization. But, that might not be a surety we can have ahead of time. God does seem to call us to take one step at a time, after all. In doing our research, we found that a typical Domestic Private Adoption has about 3 different payment ranges. If we go through an adoption agency we could be looking at as much as $30,000. This would give us access to the most birth mothers. If we go with an adoption attorney or a smaller agency, we’re looking at about $15,000-$16,000, but fewer birth moms will see our adoption profile. These costs seem so high! Yet there is one more option. We can find the birth mother ourselves or through our networks. This would cost around $10,000.
For Those Who’ve Adopted and Fundraised…
How do we know what number to shoot for? How do we know when we should ask for donations? (For not-yet-adopters. Most grants/scholarships require a placement or signed agreement with the birth mother before you can apply for them.)
Brittany M Putman 
There are multiple Facebook groups as far as raising funds for adoptions that I’m in that I can add you to. They might have some advice there.
I think it would be helpful for you to meet with a birth mom who is over an organization called Hannah’s song ministries. They work with birth mamas after placement (and sometimes expectant mamas pre-placement). It really helps the process understanding both the expectant mother’s journey in addition to your own perspective. I’ll message you her info 🙂
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Kim, Thanks for your networking! Through my research and reading, I’ve definitely come to be more aware of the adoption triad (birth mother, child, birth parent). Hannah’s song ministries sounds like an amazing organization!
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Adoption has been an amazing, beautiful, scary, awesome, hard, wonderful journey. God truly makes beautiful things out of dust. Our hearts could never have imagined the joy and grief we would feel during our adoption journeys. Absolutely, one hundred percent worth all of it.
I’ll let you know some thoughts. We’ve had one adoption loss (working with an agency) and two private adoptions (we were working with agencies each time and while waiting friends of friends contacted us about adopting their soon to be born babies). We are very passionate about adoption, open adoption when it’s a good option and supporting adoptive, foster and waiting families.
I’ll touch on a few things from your post.
First, as far as the stuff for your home study. Do whatever is on the list to do. Then anything extra can wait until they tell you it’s necessary. Typically, the caseworkers are for you and want to make sure you have a safe and loving home. For our first adoption we had everything done, super clean house, etc…for our second we had just had flooring put in hours before the caseworker arrived. So the main level looked ridiculous and there was no furniture anywhere except chairs for us to sit on. Usually by the time they come to your home they have a good feel for who you are. It’s different from state to state, but that’s the typical order.
Now on to the fundraising. So for both adoptions- our friends fundraised for us (one of the times without us knowing). 🙂 Our last adoption was 7 years ago so right when GoFundMe and all the fundraising sites really took off. If we did it again I honestly think I’d start the fundraising as soon as you have some deadlines to meet. Fundraising for adoptions is really common and if people think it’s weird, then they don’t need to give. Having the funds ready for when you get “the call” is wonderful. It takes SO much stress off an already very stressful situation. We still needed extra money for various reasons (for both adoptions) so I’d say go with something average to above average on the amount. 🙂
If you have any other questions or want to chat about anything, then please feel free to reach out. Having people that know what you are going through is so helpful during this process. 🙂
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Teri, Thanks so much for posting this to the blog! What a help it will be to us and others that are on their own adoption journeys. It’s so good to hear the experiences of others and hope that we can learn and grow in our own process! Thank you!
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