There are so many mixes of emotions that Jon and I have been feeling lately. We feel excitement for coming closer to our hope dreamed for of having a child. Andrea's amazing sister Hillary and her husband Eric have been beyond supportive by gifting us our first "baby gear". Passing by the car seat and bassinet everyday makes it more real. Yet, we still get hit with feelings of sadness when we see a family living life together. The other day we just held each other and cried saying "I want to be a mom" and "I want to be a dad". This process has stretched us in faith and hope beyond anything we have gone through before.
Anyone who has gone through the infertility process and through the adoption process will be able to tell you that you are balancing on an edge of excitement, hope, patience, fear, sadness, anger, apathy, and not wanting to get "too" excited because there are so many unknowns.
But we have hope. We believe. We know this will happen. So, we press forward to our dreams. We have now completed all our home study meetings and now are waiting for it to be approved soon. We have also been working closely with the National Embryo Donation Center(NEDC) in Knoxville, TN to set-up our first initial appointment. We will meet with them June 20th. This meeting is to see how Andrea's body responds to the medications required for implantation of the embryos and also to meet all those we will be working with in this process. They also will do a "mock transfer" to ensure the process will go as planned.
NEDC only does transfers of embryos every other month, so our hope is to do our actual transfer in September, but if that does not work out, we will try for November. In between our home study being approved and our hope of a Fall implantation, we will be working with NEDC to be matched with a genetic family to adopt embryos from. Our hope is to have an open adoption and to create a relationship with them, so that our child(ren) can know their genetic family.
Now onto our next big step of faith, needing help from our friends and family. In order to do a fall transfer, we will need to raise all the funds needed. If we do not raise the funds needed this summer, we will not be able to have a transfer until we do. There are many costs associated with this process, and Jon and I are unable to do it on our own. We do have faith that it can happen. Here is a summarized review of costs we are looking at.
Has Been Covered Through Donations and Out of Pocket
$4000 home study fees, initial fees to NEDC, medical
Yet to be Covered
By June 20th - $3690
medical, travel
By September - $6750
home study review by NEDC, medical procedures, paperwork/admin fees, open adoption mediation, travel
How Can You Help?
We are looking into many options for fundraising this summer, the first one we want to do is an online silent auction. We have had many talented friends and family approach us and say they would create and donate items for us to sell. The one thing we knew is that we have many friends and family across the country and living internationally that we would like to give the opportunity to get involved. So, we thought an online silent auction was a great answer for this. We would like to have items and services on the silent auction (or anything else that creative people can think of for this). We are now putting feelers out there to see if anyone is willing to donate to our silent auction. If you are donating items we will put up pictures of the items with a description and ask that you would cover the shipping cost to the person who "wins" the item. If a service, (photo sessions, handyman services, etc...) we will ask that the people auctioning on this would live in the area you are able to come to do such services and that you would contact the person who "wins" to set-up the service.
Once we feel we have enough items/services to make a silent auction, we will then set a date/time range in which to start and stop the silent auction. We will also ask that if you have friends or family members that would like to get involved as well, share this with them too! The more the merrier!
If you are interested in donating to the online silent auction, please e-mail Andrea at ajmorse1017@gmail.com instead of commenting on the blog or on a link to this blog.
As always, if you would prefer to donate to our GoFundme site you can follow the link here:
https://www.gofundme.com/jonandrea2adopt
Thank-you so much for following us in this journey and we look forward to seeing our dreams of becoming a family become a reality.
