7000 Names: The Dakin Family Love Story

What an incredible December! It has made up for the very LONG fall season we endured. We had a lot of obstacles to jump through for us to be ready to present our family’s profile book to expectant mothers. We received the great news that our home study was approved on November 7th, 2018.

We made the choice to work with two other organizations throughout our adoption journey. First, we made the decision to work with a consulting agency, Faithful Adoption Consultants (F. A. C.). They do not work in direct relationship with expectant parents, but they do work with different private agencies all over the country. Their main goal is to help connect their clients, the hopeful adoptive parents, with the agencies expectant mothers. The requirements to become an active client (with F. A. C.) were almost at extensive as our home study requirements. I think that’s why they suggested that we sign up with them right when we began the home study process so we didn’t have to paper chase and document file more than once. We financially couldn’t do both when we began our home study paperwork in Feb 2018. However, because of our 7000 names fundraiser we were able to sign with F.A.C. in September.

We also signed with Kindred + Co. a professional profile-book company. They created the most beautiful book that shared who we are as a family. They did an incredible job of capturing the real us. Our book wasn’t complete until right before Thanksgiving.

With those holidays in the midst, we didn’t get our books in to F.A.C until the end of November. We received our “ACTIVE” email on December 5th. We began receiving emails the very next day of cases. We had to make the decision (in less than 24 hours)  if we wanted to present our book to these women. We saw six cases in five days. We said yes to showing our profile book twice. The second mom we presented to chose our family on December 12th, 2018. The most incredible words you could ever hear on a phone call… “Hey, Aly, you and JR are MATCHED!” That process took all of SEVEN days! We matched to our future seventh child and he/she’s incredible first mama in seven days!

We are overwhelmed with excitement and hope. God’s heart for adoption just continues to humble us. What we see as impossible or hard in adoption, God sees as a passionate pursuit. He calls us HIS OWN. He never held back in his pursuit for us. We have grown so much through our waiting days, turned months and turned into almost years.

His never ending example of pursuit of us, even when He wasn’t guaranteed our hearts, blows us away. He came for us anyways. He ALWAYS sees us as his OWN. He went to the most extensive lengths for us. We have a lot of money to raise in the next few weeks. Yet we are overflowing with faith that God has miracles in store for us to marvel at. He is faithful. He has called us to this pursuit, We stand in faith that He will be faithful to complete what He has started. We will be bringing a baby home sometime at the end of February! Please continue to pray for us!

It is our dream to see our story stretch wide in a community like minded folks who believe in children, family, life and adoption. We are looking for 7000 story builders, to be apart of helping us build our story. If 7000 people give $7 we can fully fund our adoption. We would love to invite you to partner with us on this. $7 is an amount that young and old can give. Please consider donating $7 and your name today! We can’t wait to gather the thousands of names that will become a collection that builds our adoption story.

Donate you name here

It has been over a year since our family shared our dream of adoption with Adopt a Love Story. We have spent the last year climbing endless hills of circumstance. We have persevered and here we are a year later with our home study half way finished and a fundraising dream of how to fulfill this dream of adoption. Finances have held us back at times but more than that we have been faced with circumstances we couldn’t control the timing on, the home we lived in after we first landed in California didn’t have enough bedrooms for us to move forward with our home study. It took us months to find a home with enough bedrooms for us to be approved.

We spent numerous months of battling with electrical problems in the rental we found, the landlords didn’t want to fix the problems and they actually gave our deposit back to us and asked to us move.  After a lot of prayer and surrender the home we had found worked out after all. Miracles can happen even through electricity! In the spring of 2018, we finally began our home study paperwork. We have been busy doing the education portion of our checklist. I had to get CPR and first Aid certified, and I was honestly annoyed by it, in my mind I had managed to care and mother six children, why did I need this certification when my husband is a professional in the medical field?

I had to spend a lot of time doing the online modules and then spend an afternoon at an in-class hands on session. I was so surprised by how much I was wrong! I was so happy to learn every thing that was taught. That knowledge would have probably saved me handfuls of tears in years past when my children were smaller and had accidents that I wasn’t trained in handling. We always made it through but now, on this side of the certification I feel so confident in my ability to care for injuries.

We are back at a stand still in our adoption process. Moving to California a year and a half ago was a dream but every dream requires hard work and a lot of sacrifice. We are back in position where we have to hold on moving forward because we need to creativity raise funds to help us continue. We are a one income family that is passionate about being a family that lives life together.  We homeschool our children, we never go without but currently my husband is working two jobs to make room for us to have additional funds to move forward.

We are hopeful that all this hard work will be apart of our story someday that helped us see what we were made of when we rallied hard as a family to bring our youngest family member home. In the midst of JR’s hard work we spent months dreaming up ways to fundraise.

We have finally come up with plan that can carry us through until we are fully funded. Please take a few moments to read about our vision with our 7000 names fundraiser.