Any Day Now

So, how’s your adoption going? This is the question I get almost daily, and really, I don’t mind. I enjoy explaining the process of adoption to others. If you’re not personally involved in it or connected in some way, it can be hard to understand sometimes, especially since many times it is such a long process.

So, how is our personal journey going? Once again we are in a waiting period “hurry up and wait”. We have done everything on our end that we need to do at this point. Our dossier (lots of paperwork) is in Ghana, and we are currently waiting for a referral of a child from Ghana. When will we receive that information? Well, according to our adoption agency, it will be “any day now”. Which literally means it could be tomorrow, or it could be in the next month or two. Right now it is out of our hands and out of the hands of our agency and is in the hands of the government of Ghana.

There are some other families that are in front of us, and once those families have been processed through, them we will receive our referral. These families already had a match with a specific child, and in the midst of their process many adoption laws in Ghana changed. One of those being a new committee that was created. This committee has to review and confirm that each child is a legitimate orphan and is adoptable. This is a good thing, but it does slow things down here at the beginning as this law is just being put into place. These families are currently waiting to hear that the child they have already been matched with are adoptable, and I’m sure they would all covet your prayers through this process. Once these families are through this process it will be our turn, which again could be “any day now”.

As soon as we receive information on the referral of a child and accept this match, we will be free to travel to Ghana to be with our child. We will be in Ghana for a full month to do a fostering period with our child during which time our child will live with us. We are not 100% sure what the process looks like after this one month fostering period (again, lots of law changes), but it is looking like we may have to return home for a period without our child and return at a later date to bring him/her home. If you would pray with us, please pray that this second waiting period would be very short or even better that God would do a miracle and everything would be taken care in this month long period and our child could come home with us.

So, for the time being we are waiting and working hard to save every penny we can and raise as many funds as we possibly can while we are waiting. Whether we receive our referral information tomorrow or next month, almost all of the remaining funds needed for this adoption will be due at that time, so we have a relatively short period of time to come up with this money. We have applied to many grant foundations for an adoption grant and have been so blessed to receive two grants thus far and are hoping for a few more in the near future. One grant we just received last week is from One17Foundation for $1,500. You can read our story on their website. The second one is a matching grant from God's Grace Adoption Ministry. This is a matching grant meaning for every $1 we receive in donations up to $1,000, the grant will match each dollar. So if we are able to raise the full $1,000 we will actually receive $2,000. We have very few funds raised for this grant so far. If this is something you would want to donate towards, you can do so here.

If you would like to stay more up to date with our journey, you can follow our Facebook page at Mayes6Adoption. You will also find any fundraiser information we are currently doing on this page. We just completed an online auction, and we are so thankful to those that donated items and those that purchased items and helped us raise over $500! The other funding we are working on does not involve money, but it involves... shoes! We have partnered with Funds2Orgs, and we are working along with two other local adoptive families to collect at least 2,500 shoes (yes, that’s a ton of shoes)! You can find all the specifics of this shoe drive here along with information on how to donate your shoes if you would like to help us in this way. I am also selling Thirty One Gifts because I love the product, and it brings in some extra income that goes straight to adoption fees (and we're having an awesome outlet sale right now). All my proceeds from this business goes towards our adoption. Thank you all so much for your support and in following us on this journey!