A Child Waits Foundation
Adoption Grants & Adoption Loans
International and Domestic Adoption
Family Stories
Domestic Adoption 2022
In 2022 we awarded grants to help 201 children to be adopted from 25 different countries and 28 states in the USA. Some of their wonderful pictures and adoption experiences are recounted below in the family's own words.
Malakai - Arkansas
I want to thank you with all my heart for your organization's generous gift to help me with my adoption of my son Malakai. Malakai is home and doing so well! He's starting to smile and make noise back when someone talks to him. He loves to be held and swaddled. My friends and family are overjoyed and he has so many people loving him. He likes to hear me sing songs and read books.
As a single woman and a teacher, I know I could not have made this dream come true without the financial help and support from your organization. Please thank all of your staff, volunteers, and donors on my behalf. He is truly the cutest baby I've ever seen.
Sawyer - California
We are so grateful to A Child Waits Foundation for helping ease the financial stress a quick adoption placed on our family. We never thought we would have the chance to adopt a child let alone a child that allows us to honor our late son Grant’s life.
When filling out our adoption forms we decided we would adopt a child up to the age of 8 but allowed ourselves to be open to infant adoption if they had a chromosome abnormality like our son Grant. Our case worker told us that it is very unlikely they will come across an infant with a chromosome disorder so to be prepared to adopt from foster care.
The day before we were approved to adopt we heard about our daughter who has Prader Willi Syndrome. We knew right away she was a gift sent from Grant and quickly submitted our paperwork. Just 6 days later we were off on an unplanned trip to California to pick her up.
We were not prepared financially for an infant adoption and borrowed money from family members. With the help of A Child Waits Foundation, we are able to pay back family members and focus our time and energy on getting the support our daughter needs.
We are so grateful for this Foundation and how it has helped ease the stress that adoption brings. Thank you for all that you do your generousity does not go unnoticed.
Charlotte - California
We cannot express enough our gratitude to you all for the grant money for our adoption!! We also appreciate so very much all the attention and time you spent getting to know our family and care for our daughter’s story. With Charlotte’s medical needs this grants helps so much! Throughout our adoption journey we have been in awe at the generosity, kindness, and support of so many —and A Child Waits is no exception! Thank you so much for all you have done for us and for adoptees and adoptive families. We appreciate it so much! And can’t wait to update you as our daughter grows!
Isabell - Georgia
First I want to thank you for your generous grant. We appreciate all the assistance with helping us for our dream of adoption.
When we were dating and having the kid talk, both of us expressed a desire to adopt. We wanted to have one of our own and then bring a child into our family through adoption. Then after having our son he ended up in the hospital for a little and we decided that knowing medical history and genetics was so helpful, so we decided to have one more of our own instead of adopting. We ended up having a bad miscarriage in between our two sons. This created a very challenging next pregnancy and led to the conversation of adoption coming up again. We did end up having our second son, so we thought we were good. We had the two kids we said we would have and we’re happy with our family.
Right after our second son was born, I (Amy) and our oldest were reading the book we got him to get him used to being an older sibling. Which led to asking if he was happy with his new baby brother. He said yes, but next time we were going to have a girl. I had my tubes tied right after Connor was born so I informed him that this was not a possibility. He looked at me with that almost 3 year old knowing look and said no mom next time we are going to have a girl. Then for the next two years every night before he went to bed he prayed for a baby sister.
Years later, we went to a parenting workshop and driving home I mentioned adoption. A conversation we hadn’t had since we had decided to have another child instead of adopt. My husband looked at me funny, then called me crazy. I asked him to just think about it. A couple months later he brought it up. We decided to get advise and look into what this would look like or mean for our family.
After seeking lots of counsel we decided financially that foster care would be the way to add to our family through adoption, because as teachers the financial expense of adoption we thought was prohibitive to us adopting. As we worked through the foster system, they kept telling us we really weren’t interested in fostering but rather adoption, but they were desperate for families and we didn’t think we could afford to outright adopt. Then a couple of things happened financially for us. I got offered a second job at the university that would pay for my courses I was taking and pay me to attend, and would still work with my full time job, and we learned about grants like A Child Waits and that we should be able to qualify for. So we stopped the process with foster care and started looking into agencies.
After we found both a homestudy and a placing agency we started our wait. After about only 5 months we got a call, but the birthparents decided to parent their child. We then waited, and waited, and waited. We were questioning whether we were a good family, if anyone actually wanted us to adopt their child. About a year into our wait we found out our homestudy agency was closing We then had to redo our homestudy for a third time as we found a new agency. Our hearts by this time were frazzled and discouraged by our wait and the need to find a new agency to take over our homestudy. We found one that was able to still work with our placing agency, since we didn’t want to start that over as well.
Then we got called a year and nine months after we started our wait. We packed our bags and were ready to go. We then got more information about the baby, and after much tears and deliberation decided that we couldn’t take that baby. That we had to look after our kids already at home. Our hearts were broken.
We reached out to our placing agency and expressed our discouragement. They reassured us that we would get a match. Sometimes it just took more time and that we were a desirable family. They got us connected with another family that also had a long wait, and we started looking into other agencies for placement. Not because we didn’t like our agency, but just to be able to be shown to more expectant mothers and give us a higher chance of a match.
Then in January, a little over 2 years from when we first became active we got a text. The mom had a medical condition that she just found out about that had caused her current match to back out. Ironically the match that we had the previous September had caused us to research the medical condition that the Birthmom had, which made us feel comfortable to say yes to this baby.
She was born two and a half weeks after that phone call and we were able to hold her when she was only a day old. We have been home now for a month and we are all so in love. We will be finalizing this summer, pretty much exactly three years from when we started this journey, and we know our journey as a family is far from over.
Thank you for your gift. We would have never considered adoption if it weren’t for grants like A Child Waits.
Adalynn - Texas
Thank you so much again for our grant.
Here our some pictures of our sweet Adalynn. :)
McAllister - Florida
Our adoption story
predates McAllister
by over a decade. My husband and I were just out of high school and had only been dating for a few months when we found out I had leukemia. I needed a bone marrow transplant that required intense chemotherapy and total body irradiation to survive. We were told that if I survived I would not be able to have children following treatment. Cody and I's families are very close and we all chose to do fertility preservation. We froze both eggs and embryos with
Cody being the father of those embryo's. Unfortunately, technology was fairly new at the time, and the likelihood of any of them surviving was slim. Cody and I come from big families, we are all really close (our Mom's are best friends), and we both always wanted to be parents. We knew even if we didn't end up together, we would be OK with each other being those babies' parents.
Fast forward ten years, I survived, Cody and I are happily married, and ready to start that big happy family. We went to "dethaw" the eggs and embryos in hopes that they would grow, and we could have that big family we always wanted. We knew there was a very low probability of our eggs and embryos surviving and had adoption as the next step. Unfortunately, at the time of preservation the technology was too new, and none of the eggs or embryos made it.
After grieving our losses, we started the adoption process in June of 2020. We went active with an agency in January of 2021. The wait was unbearable, we had begun to lose hope, and many tears were shed. In January of 2022 two days after the Buffalo Bills lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in the overtime playoff game of a lifetime (we are big Bills fans), and we were feeling at our lowest, we got the call! January 25th, 2022, a day that will forever be ingrained in our memory. I was making chocolate chip cookies and Cody was working. We were told that "We matched" Baby Boy due in April in Jacksonville, Florida. After a whirlwind of paperwork and Money transferring, the match was official. That following Saturday we first met McAllister's Birth Mom. We loved her, and she was pretty taken by us. We were texting with her daily, and were doing weekly zoom calls. We came from such different places and backgrounds but had so many things in common. On April 1st McAllister played his first April fools joke on us. Around 7 PM CST we got a call saying his birth mom was in labor and being admitted to the hospital. We hopped in the car and called all the people. We started the 10 hour drive and when we were 3 hours from Jacksonville, we were told she was being discharged but, to continue to drive since he should be here within the next 48 hours. Needless to say, contractions had stopped and at her follow up on Tuesday, there was no sign of him coming in the next few days. We made our trek back. The next two weeks were full of anxious excitement.
The Saturday before Easter, Cody decided to take me on a date night to get my mind off of the baby. We went to dinner and to see the new Harry Potter movie. About twenty minutes into the movie, his birth Mom was calling me. I raced out of the theatre, and found out "it was go time, for real this time". I flagged Cody down and we repeated the calls and scrambled to get out of here and on the road to Jacksonville. At midnight- still no contractions, we thought we were going to make it. At 4:17 am, he decided it was time and made his grand entrance into the world. We missed it by an hour and a half. We immediately received pictures and height and weight. Our little man made it to the world. His birth mom was excited and anxious for us to get there. At 7:32 am we met our son. It was the happiest moment of our lives. We were able to get a room in the hospital to stay with him until TPR was signed. We hung out with his birth mom and her friend and got to know each other a little better. On 4/19 at 11:42 am the paperwork was complete and we were his legal guardians. We left the hospital and stayed in Jacksonville until ICPC cleared. We were able to meet his birth Mom for lunch and to exchange gifts. On April 25th ICPC cleared and we left for home. To this day we continue to maintain close contact with his birth mother. She gave us the gift of a lifetime and we will be forever thankful. It may have been the hardest and most expensive waiting of our life but we wouldn't change it for anything!
Colton - Pennsylvania
We want to say a big “thank you” to A Child Waits for helping us keep these brothers together! After we adopted our oldest son, we knew we wanted to adopt again someday, but we had no idea it would happen again so soon.
It was just a little over a year after our first adoption was finalized that our son’s birth mother reached out to us and asked us to adopt his soon-to-be-born brother. We only found out that we would be adopting him about a month before he was born, and having just finished paying off the related expenses of our first adoption, a few months prior, we weren’t nearly as financially prepared as we had been for our first adoption.
But we knew we couldn’t keep these brothers apart when we still had the room in our home and hearts for another child, and so we said “yes”, even though we had no idea how we were going to make it work. A Child Waits was able to help us bridge the gap that laid between us and bringing this sweet baby boy home to his big brother. Through their financial aid and the generosity of several others, we have been able to bring him into our family, while only acquiring minimal debt, which has been an enormous blessing to us as a young, growing family.
We are so excited to build a family with these boys and watch them grow up together, and we are beyond grateful to A Child Waits for helping us make that possible.
Elijah - Indiana
Thank you so much for the grant we received to help in the costs of our second adoption. We really cannot properly express how grateful we are for the assistance.
After a miscarriage of our first baby in 2016 and then years of infertility and treatments, my husband and I felt called to begin growing our family through adoption. Through our process the first time, in which we had one failed placement, before a perfect match with our son Ezekiel in February of 2020, we absolutely fell in love with the beauty of adoption for our family. We felt called to adopt again, especially for the sake of our son, to have a sibling who is also adopted, someone to relate to as he grows and has questions.
It wasn’t until after we suffered another miscarriage and failed placement that we were placed with our son, Elijah Dale, who was born on May 9th. Our match with Elijah’s birth mom continues to be a gift to our family and especially to Elijah as she allowed for me to be part of her prenatal doctor appointments as well as be present at his birth. I was even given the opportunity to cut the umbilical cord. We have spent a lot of time getting to know her and her family, and we truly feel that they are an extension of our family now as well.
Eli arrived after over 24 hours of labor and nearly 4 hours of pushing, but he was absolutely perfect when he arrived. We have loved seeing his personality develop as he grows and is now just over 3 months old. Eli and Zeke have such a genuine love for one another as brothers, and we cannot wait to see how that develops and grows throughout their entire life.
Thank you again so much for the gift of the grant to aid in our adoption. We cannot imagine our family without our Elijah Dale.
Blessings in Christ,
Brittany, Danny, Zeke, and Eli
John Arthur - California
We married young, which gave us time to mature in our Christian walks and allow the Holy Spirit to align our hearts’ desires to His will. We believe we were called to adoption because we came to the realization that we wanted to be parents separately and very nearly simultaneously. It was clear God had placed the desire on our hearts. Due to Rachel's chronic health conditions, we chose to pursue adoption.
After completing our first home study, we began saving and fundraising for the adoption process. We were shocked by how adoption-related expenses can add up! God has been so faithful to us. He consistently showed us that we were following His plan as funds would miraculously come through right when a bill was due!
We matched with our son's incredible and brave first family after two years of waiting! Adoption is one of the hardest things we have experienced, both individually and as a couple. Things did not happen how or when we wanted. Looking back, God knew what would happen the whole time and we would not change one part! God has been merciful and graceful to us. He used the "trial" parts of our adoption process to achieve spiritual growth in us that helped prepare us to be parents to our precious little boy.
We are so grateful to A Child Waits Foundation for providing financial support to us to help complete the adoption of our son! This grant was a huge blessing to our family that helped us to adopt debt-free! Thank you so much, A Child Waits!
Jessa - Florida
Thanks, again, and may God bless you for your kindness in supporting so many adoptive families!
We began our adoption journey at the end of 2019. After completing our home study, we were discouraged by the rising cost of adoption and saw very few cases during 2020. We let our home study expire and took a break during 2021 to save and research options to help us with funding. When we discovered the opportunity to receive funds through grants from organizations like A Child Waits Foundation, we were encouraged to continue on and renewed our home study in April 2022.
We were matched with an expectant mother four months later, and she delivered our daughter three weeks after that! A Child Waits Foundation made the grant process so simple. Every person I spoke with was warm, friendly, and eager to help us. The grant we received will go towards the legal fees for finalization, and we are eternally grateful! Our daughter is definitely one of the greatest gifts we have ever received, and we thank A Child Waits Foundation for helping us bring her home!
Makayla- Florida
Thank you for your generosity in providing a grant for our adoption! We have always dreamed and prayed about adding to our family through adoption, and the Lord finally opened those doors. We quickly found that the adoption journey is unique to each family. While I started with high hopes, we also experienced the reality of waiting for God’s timing, the heartbreak of a disruption, and the peace of God through it all. Our precious Makayla is a gift that we do not take for granted. We so appreciate your part in helping us adopt.
Bennett- Florida
The Adoption Story of Bennett, I had always dreamed of having a big family with at least 4 children. But thanks to infertility, we found out the hard way that growing our family was not going to be easy. Desiring to just provide a safe, stable, and loving home to a child in need, we became foster parents in 2015, and over the course of 3 years, we ended up fostering and adopting two beautiful children, Jeremiah and Serenity. We fostered two additional children from 2019-2021, endured excruciating circumstances in those cases, and grew extremely frustrated with our state’s foster care system. It was at that point that we decided to pursue private domestic adoption.
We officially began the adoption process in November 2021. By March 2022, we were matched! In the course of just 4 months, our lives changed forever. Baby Bennett was not born until August 2022, but we spent that time building a beautiful relationship with his birth mama, praying for her and the baby, and preparing our hearts and home for adding another little one.
Bennie is just perfect! He was exactly what our family was missing, and we love him more than words can express! Without the gift of a grant from A Child Waits, our adoption would definitely have been more difficult to complete. We are forever grateful to A Child Waits for their generosity and making our dreams more of a reality! Thank you so much, A Child Waits Foundation!
Colton- Pennsylvania
We are only a few weeks away from Colton’s first birthday and we wanted to give you a little update on how he is doing and thank you again for the instrumental role you played in helping us bring him home last year.
Colton is such a happy, healthy, growing boy! He is so full of life and very friendly and always smiles at everyone he meets. His big brother Quinn absolutely adores him, and gives him lots of kisses every day. He is the first thing Quinn asks about when he wakes up, and the boys love playing together, especially in the water and with anything that has wheels.
Colton enjoys being cuddled and sung to, and going for walks in his wagon. He loves musical toys, playing with bubbles, and doing anything his big brother is doing. He has such a sweet, easygoing personality and he melts the hearts of everyone he meets in seconds.
Colton is such a blessing to our family, and we are so thankful he is able to grow up so close to his other siblings here in Florida. We are very grateful for the part you played in making that possible and we all thank you again from the bottom of our hearts for everything you have done for our little family!