Some people find their soulmates; these two found their adorkable geekqual. Meet Jeff and Jessica in Belleville, Michigan. Jessica is a middle and high school history teacher. Jeff is a therapist at an inpatient facility helping people recovering from substance abuse. They met on Christian Mingle and quickly fell in love over shared nerdy interests like history, anime, video games, and board games. After sending many page long emails, they had their first nerd date at a museum, and the rest is history. A year later, they were married, and they now cement their nerdy status by celebrating their anniversary yearly by going to an anime convention.
Towards the end of their first year of marriage, they started trying to get pregnant. After several years of trying (including Jessica having surgery to remove an ovarian tumor found during a clomid cycle) they went to a fertility clinic for many tests and were told that their chances of conceiving naturally were incredibly slim. Disheartened, they started to look into their options. They adopted two dogs from rescue shelters, but adorable as they were, dogs just aren’t children (even though Jessica keeps buying clothes for them!). They looked into IVF, traditional adoption, and foster care, but didn’t feel called to any of those for various reasons. Then one day, Jeff heard about embryo adoption while listening to the radio, and they quickly fell in love with the idea. Unfortunately, they had a country music album’s worth of bad luck (job loss, unexpected home repairs, and emergency surgeries, to name a few things), and were struggling to save enough money for the procedure. Jessica began researching every grant and way to raise money for embryo adoption that she could find. So many grants covered traditional adoption or IVF, but very few covered embryo adoption. She was overjoyed to find out about Parental Hope and showed Jeff the grant information. Feeling very positive about what they read about the grant and its recipients, they applied for the Parental Hope embryo adoption grant.
After being medically cleared at the NEDC and starting to wonder if they would be able to afford the procedure, they found out that they received the Parental Hope grant! Many tears and tissues later, they are so incredibly excited to head into this journey and incredibly thankful for Parental Hope making this possible.
“We’ve been dreaming of starting our own family for years and have been met with nothing but disappointment for so long. Then it felt like God has opened so many doors for us over the past 6 months, and we couldn’t be more grateful for all the support and love we’ve gotten from family and friends as we started pursuing this option. Thank you, Parental Hope, for making this dream come true for us.”