Coffee With a Cause

If you are anything like us, you need a cup or two of coffee in the morning to get the day started. We need it for the caffeine, of course, but also because we just enjoy good coffee. And we enjoy drinking it together.

One of our favorite things to do when exploring a new city is to find a good, locally owned coffee shop. For that reason, our most recent partner in our adoption process is an absolutely perfect fit for our family. Well Bean Coffee is a local coffee shop that serves ethically sourced coffee, smoothies, and healthy snacks. Not only do we appreciate their coffee, but the owner and marketing director are friends of ours! We love their mission to serve good coffee and serve the community. They also give $1 of every sale to NewSong Nicaragua, a mission organization in Central America.

Our friends at Well Bean have offered to give us 25% of every sale online that uses our adoption code: ANEST. To order a bag of coffee, just go to their website and click "shops" and then "coffee retail." Once you are there, choose the kind of coffee you want, along with the size bag and grind. When you check out, be sure to put in our code (ANEST), and voila! That is all you need to do.

If you would like to tell us that you bought a bag of coffee to help our adoption, we would love that! We want to include as many friends in our adoption puzzle project as possible. See the previous blog post that explains the puzzle here.

Thank you all for your continued support and encouragement.

With love,
Chris & Jessica

Another Milestone!

Hello, friends and family! We wanted to ask for your prayers this weekend, as we will be attending a training session with our adoption agency on Saturday. This is a necessary step before we can begin our homestudy, and we are excited about what we'll learn there and that this will bring us one step closer to bringing our child home. Please pray that we will trust the Lord with this process and that we will be an encouragement to the other families who will be there with us.

We also wanted to say THANK YOU to those who have donated already to our adoption fundraiser. There are already 7 puzzle pieces with names on them :) We are blown away by the generosity of our friends and family. We truly could not do this without you! If you would still like to make a donation, please click on the Adoption Changes Everything link on the right side of this blog.

Last (at least for this post), a friend of ours shared this hilarious yet true video on the crazy things adoptive parents hear. Enjoy!

How can you help us? I'm glad you asked!

The thought of adopting a little one into our home is exciting, but there are a lot of fees and expenses along the way. Money has been, and I'm sure will continue to be, the most challenging thing about our whole adoption experience. We have felt that God in his Holy Spirit is pressing on our hearts to seek out adoption from right here in North Carolina. But just because we know where God is leading us doesn't mean that we always know how we will get there. We have to trust that God will move in the hearts of our family and friends in order to help us raise the money needed to bring our new son or daughter home.

So here is the part where we ask you to give. 

There are two ways you can give. First (and most importantly) you can pray for us. Give of your time to pray for us as we walk through the stressful time of working, making sacrifices to save money, doing paperwork over and over again, getting physicals, going to required training and counseling, and meeting with the social worker to complete our home study. Pray that we would live out our faith well in each of these situations. Pray that we would be mindful of our thoughts and actions toward each other within our marriage as we sometimes feel like we're in a pressure cooker and other times we don't see how God will ever bring this whole process to fruition. Pray that we would experience joy as we live out the gospel and adopt another person into our family, just as God adopted us into His. 

After you have prayed for us, the second way you can give is by donating money. Below are the two major costs that we need help with, and below each I listed the different things that are being done with the money given to the adoption agency. 

First is the waiting list fee, which is $5,000. By giving this money to the agency, the agency then provides the following: 

• Counseling and related services to birth families
• Advertising (the adoptive parents to the birth families)
• Communication by the agency staff to the adoptive parents
• Meetings with potential birth parents (when applicable)
• General Operating Expenses
• Publications
• Maintaining adoptive parent profile on agency website
• Other operational costs related to adoption services

The second fee is the placement fee, which is $15,000. By giving this money to the agency, the agency then provides the following:

• Post placement supervision
• Hospital time and discharge
• Child placement
• Legal documentation preparation for the birth families
• Execution of documents and submission to court
• Termination of birth father's rights
• Court hearing
• Ongoing counseling with birth parents
• Finalization of document preparation and submission for adoptive family
• Communication with adoptive family
• General operating expenses. 
• Post relinquishment counseling to birthparents on grief, life, relationships and sexual integrity. 

You can donate at our fundraising site by clicking here 
(or click on our widget on the right side of the blog)

We are also doing something special with the puzzle from our previous post. 

The first 252 people that donate anything will get their name written on the back of a puzzle piece. We are going to put the puzzle together and frame it in a two sided frame to hang it in the baby's room. One day we will use the puzzle to tell our little one their adoption story, complete with all the people who wanted him or her to be a part of our family.

**Please note: all donations are going straight to the adoption agency, so they are all tax deductible as well. 

Pieces of the Puzzle

More details about this to come soon, but we're excited about a special puzzle that will be in our little one's room someday!