Unforgettable

Saturday was an evening we will never forget. This weekend left a mark on our lives that is truly incredible and we will never be able to express what it meant to us.

When we first announced to our families that we planned to pursue international adoption, fundraising came up quickly as part of the conversation. While we were resistant at first (it can be awkward and uncomfortable), we quickly realized that in order to pay the fees associated with bringing our children home in the relatively near future, we would need to ask for help in some form or fashion to supplement our savings plan – fundraising, grants, loans, etc. We attended a seminar through our adoption agency on affording adoption early in our process and learned a lot about all of the different ways to raise funds; this started the discussion on how we would move forward, step by step, to make this part of the adoption process a reality.

Mary’s family had the idea of a trivia night and silent auction and ran with it from the start. The planning started around Christmas and the outpouring of support was overwhelming from the beginning. Donations of silent auction items and reservations to attend came pouring in and the next couple of months were full of plans and excitement. Saturday finally arrived and we had 28 silent auction items with 115 seats reserved – this was well beyond what we could have even hoped for! The event was such a fun time – Scott and I loved seeing teams of people from all areas of our lives come together to have such a fun evening playing trivia! We had people there from all over the country to support adoption – our family and friends traveled from all over Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Kansas to come to this event. We wished we had the time to sit down and talk for hours with every single table – it was so fun to have such a tremendous team there in support of adoption and in support of our family! Like we've said many times before – it takes a village to raise a child and we were so thankful for this time with our “village” this weekend.

Our families ran this event – from writing the trivia, purchasing/baking all of the food, checking people in, setting up, tearing down, managing the 50/50 raffle, keeping the food stocked, etc. – the event was a success thanks to our family. We cannot say how truly grateful we are for all of the time, money, and effort they put into this event!!!

From the fundraising perspective, this event went beyond what we could have EVER imagined. Close to $8,000 was donated on Saturday night through ticket sales, the silent auction, MudLOVE bracelet sales, 50/50 raffle, and additional donations. Like we said… speechless. We are adopting a sibling group (will explain more below), which will be approximately $40,000 in fees. To raise 20% of our total cost in one evening? Absolutely incredible. Your generosity and hearts for adoption have humbled us in ways we cannot explain. We appreciate your support more than words would ever be able to say. You have all left an impression on us & our families that will last a lifetime.

We have some significant updates on the process, too!

Our home study draft is complete! Woohoo!! We met with the agency again last Wednesday to finalize any remaining questions they had, then they sent us our home study draft on Friday afternoon! We are in the process of reading through it and making any edits we need to – it will go back and forth like that between us and the agency until everyone feels good and then it’ll be complete! Yay! Once that is finalized, then we start on our dossier paperwork. In the meantime, we also get to start on our education and we are very excited for that. We received our education plan when we met with them and are anxious to get going on it. We are excited to learn about parenting, parenting adopted children specifically, and all about different techniques, stressors, etc. More to come on that as we complete it!

A very significant update that comes as part of our home study is our wish to adopt a sibling group. We have said all along that we were open to a sibling group, but what we did not anticipate as part of the home study process was the recommendation of putting that we were looking to adopt a sibling group specifically. Instead of, for example, putting that we are looking to adopt 1-3 children, we now have that we are looking to adopt 2-3 children. So, a match to an individual child is highly unlikely since we have made that more specific. While we are certainly open to an individual child, they urged us to be very specific, which led to us the indication of a sibling group. So now, our reference to “our children” rather than “our child” is very purposeful! From the beginning of our adoption process, we have felt very led to being open to a sibling group, but for some reason taking the leap to putting that into our home study felt like a huge one. Rather than a sibling group being a “possibility”, it quickly became a reality as it is in our home study and will eventually go to Eastern Europe as part of our paperwork.

You might be tired of hearing it, but we will never be tired of saying thank you. We feel that our words fall so short of expressing our true gratitude to all of you for your support, encouragement, generosity, and prayers. We are so thankful for our village.

Love,
Mary and Scott

A few pictures from trivia night!

So excited for an incredible evening!

One of my best friends, Megan!

Best friends that came all the way from Ohio!

Full house for trivia!

My Dad emcee'd the evening and ran the trivia!

Sarah modeling all of our beautiful MudLOVE options! Bracelet MVP/Coordinator

The winning trivia team - so fun!

Sarah doing what she does best... bracelets!

Dinner time! Our families kept all of our guests fed and entertained!

My awesome brother and sister helping to run the event!

Good Point

Thanks again for checking in!

We wanted to write an update because this week we've taken some steps forward in the process and wanted to keep you in the loop.

Remember the binder-o-documents we discussed in the last post? Well, we finalized that and turned it in last Monday. It was approved (which basically means we had everything in it we needed) and we were contacted within 24 hours to schedule our first home study visit! That was scheduled for today and we just finished meeting with two representatives from our agency. I was anticipating them walking through our house, asking if we had smoke detectors, making sure everything was clean, and flushing all the toilets to ensure they were in proper working order. Turns out, they did tour our house (which took about 5 minutes), but the majority of the time was spent answering questions. The agency asked us questions about ourselves, our upbringing, our plans for discipline, our jobs, what we hope our children will grow up to be like, what parenting fears we have, etc. I'll be honest, it was fun :). It's fun to dream and be asked to talk about it. These are conversations we have all the time - conversations about the kind of parents we want to be, what we're excited about, what we're afraid of, etc.. But to get asked to talk about them was exciting! So anyways, we answered a bunch of questions and then scheduled home study visit #2 for a week from today. Once they review what we went over today, next week will be to follow up on anything and finalize the information they need to write the home-study. Once our interviews are done next week, our home-study should be written and through all the approvals (has to go back and forth a bit between us and the agency) within about a month. YAY!!

Once the home-study is complete, we move on to dossier prep. More on that later (because we don't know what all that entails yet, either!). 

The visit today with the agency was exciting. It was also a thought-provoking time for us. Not only because we were asked things like "what would you do differently in parenting than your parents did?", but because we had the opportunity to hear some "cautions" from our agency. I appreciate our agency because they paint, what we feel, is a very realistic picture of international adoption. They have done this since our initial information session and throughout the process so far. When I say "realistic," I don't mean bad. I mean that they want us to be fully informed and understand the good, the bad, and everything in between. We appreciate that. Throughout our fertility journey, the only constant was that things were unknown... we never knew what would happen next, when it would happen, and if it had any chance of "working." We would rather hear the scary parts of international adoption than have an unrealistic idea of what everything will be like. Here's an example. When asked what we're excited about in being parents, I said (among many other things), that I am excited to be "that person" that our children run to when they are scared, or excited, or hurt, or confused, or anything... I'm excited for us to be those people who our children trust completely and love fully, and that we can experience the kind of love and relationship that we've heard only exists between a parent and child. Our agency rep said that she completely understood and agreed with what I was saying, but that she wants to make sure I realize that it won't be like that from the beginning. We will get there, sure, but unlike a biological child who has known their parents as their "go to" since their first breaths, we will be strangers to our children for a bit. They've known life in an orphanage, and to come home to a different country, different smells, tastes, sounds, and with people they're now supposed to call Mom and Dad is confusing. It's unsettling. And we might not be able to comfort them like a parent normally would when their child is scared. We won't have that trust yet. 

Good point. 

It is a lot to think about. This was one of a handful of times during the visit that our agency gave wonderful advice/thoughts. I suppose that is why we did research and chose an agency we trust, right!? They help us think about the things we haven't thought about yet. Of course we knew there would be a transition. We know our children won't know us as Mom and Dad when we first meet them, but sometimes hearing it from someone else makes it finally click. 

The thing is, we can't wait to earn that trust. We can't wait to truly become Mom and Dad to our children. It will not be an easy road to travel, but we're excited to navigate it as a family.  

I feel overwhelmingly thankful to have such a strong team guiding us through this. They're responsive, honest, compassionate, and helpful. They've been there, too. Many of the staff members at our agency have adopted internationally, so they know the emotions and the ups and downs - what a blessing to have people working with us who can relate on a whole new level. 

And hey! Thank YOU for being on this journey with us, too! 

Until next time,
Mary and Scott

February Update!

Thank you for checking in again! We cannot tell you enough how much it means to us that you've taken an interest in our adoption process and we appreciate you continuing to follow along!

We have a lot of things to update you on, so here we go!

The paperwork process is well underway. We submitted our contract and first payment to the adoption agency on January 2nd and by that following Monday, we had our paperwork available and next steps outlined for us. The first big step is the home-study and we have been working on that process since the first full week of January. We originally thought that someone would come to our house, make sure it's safe, and write a little report on that... home-study done. Turns out, we were wrong!! This process has included compiling documents, obtaining legal information, and writing responses to several autobiographical questions, etc. We have gotten our fingerprints taken twice, submitted background check paperwork for Indiana, Ohio, New Mexico, and Northern Ireland, both had physicals, obtained four letters of reference, figured out how to obtain said background check from Northern Ireland (which, turns out, is more difficult than one might think!), took Leo to the vet, and dug up all sorts of paperwork we never even knew we had :). We have compiled all of the needed information and are now submitting that to the agency for review. Once the agency reviews and approves that we have everything they need, a representative will come to our house and conduct interviews with us, check out the physical state of our home, interact with Leo, etc., and then write the home-study report. The report will compile all the information from our binder-o-documents along with what they hear/observe when here and that is what the home-study will consist of. Once that is done, we move on to the next step! The home-study will be part of  the dossier that is submitted to Eastern Europe. The dossier is what the adoption decision-makers will use to match us with a child/children. So, that is where we are in the process! We have been working diligently to get all of the paperwork done as efficiently as possible as we're anxious to get our dossier across the ocean!

Fundraising has been the most incredibly humbling experience of our lives. We cannot tell you all what it has meant to us to receive your bracelet orders, reservations for trivia night, and donations to our AdoptTogether account. We currently have enough in our AdoptTogether and adoption checking accounts to cover our next two payments (one at the time of home-study completion and the other when our dossier is submitted to Eastern Europe). Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is over a third of our total needed and we never expected to be where we are financially right now; we cannot thank you all enough for your incredible generosity.

We are anxious for our home-study to be complete because not only will we be one step closer in the process, but a lot of grant applications require that the home-study be complete before submitting, so once that is done, we will be able to pursue grants more fully as well! Scott also passed his test and has received his insurance license (yay!!) - he'll be starting work in Larry's office soon to earn extra income for the adoption!

The home-study, bracelet sales, and trivia night have kept us busy and we are enjoying every step in this process. We know that there will be a time when we're simply waiting. Waiting to be chosen to be Mom and Dad to a sweet child/children, so we are relishing these days when we can do tangible things to move us closer to that!

In related news, have you all seen our new nephew?? Sweet Henry Michael joined our family on January 30th and we just can't get enough of him :). Spending time with this little man, along with all of our nieces and nephews, makes us even more excited to have our children home with us soon.  

Your prayers, support, and encouragement have meant the world to us and we cannot thank you enough for everything. We have all heard that saying that "it takes a village to raise a child" and that could not be more true for us as we move along this journey. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. 

Love, 
Scott and Mary

Fundraising

Thank you for checking in again! 

Wow. It is an understatement to say that we have been humbled over the last month or so since we announced our plans to adopt internationally. The comments, emails, phone calls, facebook messages, etc. have been overwhelming. Thank you so much for the support. It has truly been a life-changing time for us, and we haven't even adopted our child/children yet! From the bottom of our hearts, we cannot say thank you enough. 

We have gotten a lot of questions recently about fundraising efforts and how our friends and family can support us financially. First of all, thank you for asking about this. We do have a plan (that we know will be fluid and ever-changing!) and would love to share that with you. 

First, we have developed a strict budget that will allow us to set aside a significant amount of money on a monthly basis for our adoption. For us, this means spending less money on "wants" and taking more care to assess a need versus a want. We've decided to cut out a lot of the things that we have become accustomed to doing, like weekend getaways, girls' nights, paintball weekends, etc. We have also taken a summer vacation nearly every year we've been married and this year we're thinking Indianapolis sounds like a sweet destination :). Scott's parents have generously offered to take our entire family on a cruise in March, but aside from that, we plan to stay put at home this year. We have re-evaluated what we spend our money on and will continue doing that in a more intentional way than we have in the past. 

Scott is currently in the process of studying to get his insurance license to work part time with Mary's brother, Larry, in his office. This will be an opportunity for Scott to put some extra money into our adoption account as any income from that endeavor will go straight there. 

We also have a couple of fundraising events currently in the works, and a couple in the future where our friends and family can get involved.

We are currently planning a trivia night/silent auction on March 7th (see previous post!). We are collecting silent auction items and selling tickets to the event. We hope to not only raise money for our adoption through this event, but have a great time as well! Larry Jr. and Larry Sr. are hosting the event... it'll be fun no matter what :). Let us know if you're interested in joining us for this fun evening!

We have purchased 150 bracelets from the company MudLOVE. This an Indiana-based company that sells the bracelets pictured below. MudLOVE is set up to help people with fundraising - we purchase the bracelets at a bulk price and sell them for $10 - this allows us to make a profit for our adoption account through the bracelet sales. The benefit to this fundraiser is two fold - they help us raise money for our adoption, and MudLOVE also provides a week of clean drinking water to someone in Africa for every product purchased. How great is that? Since we just launched our trivia night/silent auction on facebook, we haven't posted a lot about the bracelets, but if you're interested, just let us know! These are the words that are available - they come in a variety of colors (more than are shown in the picture)! The words are on a piece of clay and the bands are adjustable elastic. 

We also have plans to have a garage sale or two this summer with items we have around our house and items that family/friends are looking to get rid of. This fall, a dance-a-thon is in the works, too. T-shirt sales have been another idea we are considering. As the process moves forward, we are going to constantly evaluate where we are financially and how to best move forward. 

Lastly, we have had several inquiries on whether or not we have set up a fundraising account people are able to use to donate directly to our adoption. We have been working to find the best option for this and became aware of AdoptTogether - an online fundraising platform that allows donations to be tax-deductible. We were recently approved for this account! If you are interested, please check out our link below: 

 http://adopttogether.org/dearmondadoption  

Again, we want to thank you all for your support. We have been overwhelmed by the thoughtful messages we have received and are truly brought to our knees by the encouragement we have felt. 

Love, 

Scott and Mary

ps: of course we will post again soon, but things are moving forward in our adoption process and we're in full swing!!

Trivia Night and Silent Auction!

Hi Friends! 

Please check out the event below - We would love to have you join us for this night of fun! Thank you so much for your support!

The First Part of Our Story

Welcome back :)

By now, you know we're adopting and a little background on why. Part of the purpose of this blog is for people to follow along who may be considering this path to starting a family. For some people, this decision includes a long battle with infertility and we know all too well that sometimes you just want to talk to or hear from someone who has been through it, too. So, we would like to take a brief pause from our adoption journey to make this one post about the first part of our story. Please do let us say, though, that the last reason we are posting this is for people to feel sorry for us. We are excited beyond belief to have the opportunity to adopt and the chapters below only brought us to this awesome point in the adventure to start our family. Again, we are posting this simply because we know there may be people in our lives who would receive comfort from knowing that someone else has been where they are.   

We decided a few years ago to start our family. We tried to get pregnant on our own and after months of heartbreak, we were referred to a specialist to help us with our fertility. Fast forward many months, tests, supplements, and appointments later, and we were told "you have about a one in a million shot of getting pregnant on your own." Ouch. We cried. We told our families. Then we said, "ok, so what's next?"

The answer to that was a visit to a Reproductive Endocrinologist... the fertility doctor. We went in to our first appointment with him and assumed we would have a few options to try and get pregnant with his help, but it turns out, we had one option - In Vitro Fertilization with ICSI. We literally asked in the appointment if we could do anything before we jumped to this step, as we knew IVF was "the big one." Turns out, given our particular fertility concerns and trends in our testing, it was IVF. Period.  

[Quick biology lesson for those not familiar with fertility treatment: In Vitro Fertilization with ICSI looks something like this ... Woman takes a lot of shots (hormones) to make her body produce more than the normal one egg she does in a given month. During the few weeks of shots, the doctor is taking blood and doing ultrasounds every other day to watch the formation of the eggs. The eggs are then surgically removed. After removed, the Embryologist inserts the guy's sperm into the eggs. Once the sperm and egg come together, the Embryologist watches the little embryos for up to 5 days to make sure they are surviving and thriving. Once the embryos are ready, one or two of them are put into the woman. Then everyone waits 1-2 weeks to see if the embryos attach to the uterine lining of the woman - if they do, a positive pregnancy test happens and you're pregnant!]

So, we talked and prayed a lot and decided we would try IVF. We were worried about it not working, but after a long and tiring road to even get to this point, we were ready to try whatever we could to have children. After a couple of setbacks in our timeline due to some poor test results, we did IVF with ICSI in December 2013. Needless to say, it was not successful. I produced 6 eggs. 2 of them held on through the fertilization process, they were not strong, but they were alive. They put them back in after 3 days and we received a negative blood pregnancy test a week or two later, just before New Year's Day. Some people end up with frozen embryos from their cycle (eggs that were successfully fertilized, but they won't put more than two back into the woman, so they save the extras for a pregnancy later). Unfortunately, we did not have any frozen embryos from our cycle, so we were back to the starting line. 

[For those of you who like science, here is a picture of our little ones just moments before they were put in to me!]

We met with our two fertility doctors in January 2014 for a post-IVF consult. They used many more words than this, but to keep it as concise as possible, our IVF cycle did not go well. Once they had our fertilized eggs under a microscope and could watch the process, they were able to see why 4 of our little ones didn't make it, and the 2 that did were hanging on by a thread. They said that they would not recommend we try IVF again unless some tests came back in a much better place. By this point, we had tried all of the medications, vitamins, procedures, etc, they recommended for us. They said that we may want to begin looking at adoption as a route to have a family. They also said that the last thing they would recommend to see if our chances at IVF success would improve, would be weight loss. They said they have seen it help test results, and they've seen it not help test results, but because we had tried everything else, that was their "last hurrah" to make this happen. 

IVF was emotional, expensive, and exhausting (70 shots, people. 70!), so we weren't sure that we would do it again, but we wanted the option and honestly, just were not ready to shut the door on that chapter yet. 

So, we decided to hit the weight loss hard. Since March of this year, Mary is down around 45 lbs and Scott is down around 90. We are SO excited to report those numbers! Calorie counting, carb counting, and exercise has been the name of our 2014 game and we are thrilled to be so much healthier than we were at this time last year. Yay for that!!! 

We are sad to say, though, that the weight loss did absolutely nothing in regards to our fertility. We ran the same tests we did to determine the need for IVF and unfortunately, every single measure was exactly the same as it was before and during IVF. So, we met with the Drs for another consult and they had the same message as they did right after our IVF cycle... a second round of IVF would be a very risky route with slim chance of success. They said we could run the tests again at any time, but if we're ready to start a family soon, it may be time to turn the page.

We had received a lot of bad news throughout our years of trying to start a family, but of course, this time it felt final. It felt devastating to think of the years of trying, all the tests, all the medications, all the procedures, all the stuff that went with IVF, and all the weight loss... all to come to a place where experiencing a pregnancy was highly unlikely. So, we had a few days of wallowing, blubbery cries with tissues everywhere, and wondering "why," but then we decided that it was time to move onward and upward. The one thing that didn't change through all of this was our desire to have kids, so we're ready to make that happen through international adoption. 

If you have questions about our fertility journey, please ask. There are things we will share and things we won't, but we'll tell you everything we can and no questions are "off limits" if there is something you're struggling with or wondering. We know that when you're in this process, sometimes you want more than anything to talk to someone who has been in your shoes... and we would love to be that resource and comfort to you if we can help in any way. 

Love,
Mary and Scott

p.s.: by adding your email address to the bar at the top (under the blog title), you can receive an email notification when we publish a new post! Our understanding is that this has to be done via the web view and doesn't work if you try to subscribe on the mobile view.

Hello! Welcome to our blog! 

First of all, in case you missed the announcement... 

... and we are SO EXCITED! 

We would like to share our journey to adopt with you and hope this is a place where we can keep our family and friends up to date with the process. We hope to answer a lot through this blog, but never hesitate to reach out to us if you have questions! We hope to not only keep our family and friends informed through this blog, but also to be a resource to others in our lives who may be considering this path to starting or expanding their family.  

For our first post, we would like to give you a bit of an overview on how we came to the decision to adopt, and further, why we decided to adopt from Eastern Europe.

We decided awhile ago that we were ready to start our family. We aren't going to go into a lot of detail on this post, but after years of trying and more tests, medications and supplements than we can count, plus an unsuccessful journey through in vitro fertilization, we were told that our chances of conceiving a biological child were "one in a million." (If you're struggling with infertility or are interested in reading more about this part of our story, we will be writing our next blog post about that, going into a lot more detail.). We were told we could continue to wait and hope for a miracle, but that it would be in our best interest to look at other options for having a family. 

We had three real options that we were considering after we came to grips with the overwhelming news described above: embryo adoption, domestic adoption, and international adoption. All of these were very strong options for us and honestly, we were "sold" on each one at different points through our decision-making process. Let us also note that there are a few additional options for people at this point in their fertility journey, namely egg or sperm donation and adoption through foster care. We are not going to go into a lot of detail on these things, but to be brief: after considering those options as well, they were not right for us.  

We hadn't heard of embryo adoption before we were to this point in our journey... there is a lot to this option, but to be concise: this is a situation where we would adopt a fertilized egg that had been frozen (presumably from another couple who had undergone IVF, had extra fertilized eggs from their cycle and froze them, but had no plans to utilize them for their own family). We would adopt the frozen embryo(s), they would be implanted into Mary, and we would carry and deliver the child. We like to describe it as being our own surrogate... so we would deliver our child, but the child would not be genetically tied to either of us. This is a really neat option to experience pregnancy, be in charge of our own prenatal care, and have our child from birth. There are also definite risks to this option, as it does carry the same success rates as IVF (many embryos do not survive the thaw and implantation process). We gathered a lot of information from our fertility clinic and the National Center for Embryo Donation on this option. 

Domestic adoption is pretty well known. We would go through an adoption agency (or private attorney), put together a profile, be selected by a birth mom, and adopt a child from birth. We gathered information from three adoption agencies in Indianapolis and had also attended an information session earlier in the year with one of these agencies. 

International adoption is similar to domestic, except that we would be adopting from another country and adopting a child from an orphanage. We would be selected by an adoption governing body in that country rather than by a birth mom. We would likely bring the child home as a toddler due to the paperwork/processing times involved in international adoption. We did a lot of research on the agencies that do international adoption in Indianapolis and visited one for a one-on-one informational session to learn more. 

After many long walks and evenings where we talked and talked (and talked) about each of these options, we both came to the decision that we felt called to adopt internationally. We like the guarantee of a family (which embryo adoption did not provide) and we like that international adoption tends to be more adoptive parent driven than domestic adoption. These are reasons that we can put on paper, but after a lot of prayerful consideration for each of these options, we honestly just feel a peace and comfort from the Lord about international adoption and are confident this is the path for us. 

As far as "why Eastern Europe?" goes, we were drawn to this area of the world after our informational session with our agency. Out of the seven countries our agency supports, our desire to bring a child home as young as possible gave us three options. We heard about the specific need in each country, as well as the adoption process for each country, and we chose to move forward with Eastern Europe. (We know the specific country, but due to some agency guidelines, we cannot post it online). 

So, there you have it! To say we're excited is an understatement. We are so thankful to have this opportunity and we are ready to embark on this journey. 

In our next few posts, we'll be giving more detail on our fertility journey (for people who may be reading this and in the process themselves), and also explaining the overall process of adoption from Eastern Europe. 

We are so excited to share this journey with you and we appreciate your support more than words can say! 

Love, 

Mary and Scott DeArmond