Hello Everyone! A belated Merry Christmas, and Happy 2025!
We haven’t updated the blog in a while due to the fact that we’ve been scheduled nearly non-stop since Thanksgiving with hosting friends and family, working holiday popup events for Bethany’s business: Passing Notes, (find it here: https://passingnotes.studio/), church ministry, and general holiday happenings.
So, we felt it appropriate to start the new year by updating you all on where we are at with our home study.
Now, having sufficiently buried the lead: our home study is completed and approved!
We are very excited to reach this milestone. We finished our home study requirements and meetings before Thanksgiving, but our paperwork wasn’t officially approved until just before Christmas. Now, our profile is going live with our agency and we’re officially considered a “family in waiting” for expectant mothers to consider to adopt their child.
What’s next? First, we’ll be writing a separate post very soon to explain what happens during this waiting time, what being matched might look like, how long the process can take after a match, and what you can expect from us as far as information between now and then.
Second, we have started to apply for grants now that our home study is approved (most grants don’t let you apply until that point). You have been so generous to us financially during this process and we have been able to cash flow the entire cost up until now through your donations, Passing Notes sales, and savings. However, the road becomes a little steeper the closer we get to the end of this journey as more amounts of money are required at one time for certain milestones.
Beyond the fees and agency costs, we also talked with our social worker and discovered that birth mother costs are becoming more and more common. We always knew it was a possibility to end up paying some birth mother costs, but it’s more commonly requested now for a variety of reasons. Birth mother costs can be things like medical bills, prescription costs, or even covering rent or other costs of living, especially if a birth mother is required to be on bed rest.
One of the big reasons we chose the agency that we did when starting this adoption process was because they care for expectant mothers no matter what. They are first and foremost an agency dedicated to supporting pregnant women. One of the ways they do that is by facilitating adoption. But they also work with women who chose to parent and offer financial, emotional, spiritual, and physical support to allow them to provide for their child. For us, birth mother expenses fall in the same vein of supporting motherhood, and we are happy to provide what we can to ensure the health of both mother and child.
We are expecting somewhere in the range of $10,000 as part of these costs - and while they’re not a certainty (if they aren’t used, we will put them towards our next adoption), we want to be prepared for them. For that reason we are planning some fundraisers (we will keep you posted). If you’d like to make a donation, you can send it via mail (ask us for our address), or Venmo: @BethanyMeyer
P.S. - we still have our apparel fundraiser going (find it here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/bethany--phillip-adoption/) if you want to purchase some apparel to support our fundraising efforts and literally wear your heart/support on your sleeve!
Finally, we want to thank you all so much for your support over the last year. It’s hard to believe that we started this journey in March of 2023. Since then we’ve had friends, family, church family and even strangers show up in incredibly generous ways with prayers, fundraising, gifts, and words of encouragement. As we move into 2025 we wanted to make sure that you know we couldn’t go through this process without the support of you, our village.
Keep a lookout for our next post soon with a few more details of what the adoption process looks like next.
Thanks, Phil and Bethany