A baby, a gift…  A precious gift from above; a gift that you may choose to entrust to our care for his/her life.  With that kind of trust, we should get to know one another.  So let’s get started…  We’ll go first…

We (Robert & Adrianne) have been married for 9 years (December, 2000).  We tried to have children for 7 years before we decided to grow our family through adoption.  We talked about adoption for several years and started the process in 2008.  We are very excited to have a baby in our home, to love and nurture; to rock and cuddle, to tickle and watch giggle, to watch grow, develop and explore; to teach new things like how to crawl, walk, talk, ride a bike, read, and play ball; to help develop into a confident, loving, independent adult.

We live in a suburban setting, with a large back yard.   We just finished remodeling the interior of our house, installing bamboo wood flooring throughout the main floor and repainting all of the rooms, preparing one to be the “baby’s room”.  We live close to most of our family; only about 10 minutes from Robert’s mom.  Robert has two brothers, one of whom just had a baby girl, Maggie, who also lives within 10 minutes, while the other lives in Philadelphia.  He also has two grown nephews.  Adrianne’s parents, grandma, brother and nephews (8 and 10) live about an hour and a half away.  One sister lives less than 5 minutes away while her other sister lives in New York.  Adrianne also has a cousin that is more like a sister who has a 5-year old daughter.  Everyone is excited about the idea of having a new baby in the family to play with their cousin Maggie.

Robert does sheet metal construction and has worked on many buildings in downtown Kansas City and most recently has worked in Greensburg, Kansas to rebuild the town after it was destroyed by a tornado in 2007.  He is quiet around most people, but get him on certain subjects and he’s a different guy!  He’s very talkative and funny around the dogs.  He recently called me on a rain-out at work just to tell me how much fun he had just had playing with them.  He had been sitting at the computer when one of the dogs nuzzled his hand and whined.  She wanted to play.  He was laughing as he described how hard they played and how much fun they had.  Watching him with the dogs makes me warm inside with anticipation to watch him with a baby.  I know he will be a very warming and loving daddy. 

Although Robert has not had a lot of experience around children, our nieces and nephews have a thing for him.  Even though he’s typically pretty quiet at large family functions, at almost every occasion, I will look up at some point and find one of the kids sitting on his lap or next to him on the couch.  I think they feel safe and comfortable with him.  Robert always ends up outside playing with them. 

Robert grew up racing dirt bikes and now races sprint cars for a hobby.  He can tinker with a motor for hours.  He still goes trail riding on his dirt bike and got Adrianne into riding.  We go camping at least once a year with Robert’s brother and his wife to ride bikes on the trails for the weekend.  We also ride bicycles and like to go hiking.  We take the dogs when we can, even to the race track.  We also enjoy snow skiing and water sports.  We went to Yellowstone National Park for our honeymoon and went snow skiing at nearby Big Sky.  If its outdoors, most likely we enjoy it. 

Adrianne works for an engineering firm doing GIS (Geographic Information Systems), making maps, doing analysis, and supervising.  Adrianne plans to quit work when a baby arrives to devote her time to the family.  She takes care of the dogs as if they were children; occasionally making their food (chicken, sweet potatoes, carrots, zucchini and rice) as a birthday treat or when they are sick.  They love it! 

Adrianne grew up on a farm and still enjoys gardening.  She always helped her mom can vegetables, but she canned green beans by herself for the first time this summer.  We plan to make the garden bigger and grow as many of our own vegetables as we can.  Adrianne is very much into “natural” and organic.  Whether it is gardening, food on the table, recycling, dog care, or now, parenting.  She enrolled us in several natural parenting classes this past spring.  The classes covered a variety of topics such as vaccinations, circumcision, cloth diapering, co-sleeping, and breastfeeding.  Adrianne always planned to breastfeed her babies, but when adoption became the way we would grow our family, there was a big question until she read that adoptive moms can sometimes breastfeed their babies.  She now plans to breastfeed her baby thanks to another mother’s donation of a two-month supply of breast milk to use until Adrianne’s milk comes in

Adrianne has been around children virtually her entire life, being only 8 and 10 when her little brother and sister were born.  She helped as much as she could, feeding, changing diapers, folding diapers and playing with small farm toys with her 3 year old brother for days after he burned his foot.  At age 13, Adrianne and her sister started babysitting a pair of twins when they were only a month old.  Adrianne babysat through high school and college, including grad school.  She was trusted to care for two sets of children when their parents went to France, once for 3 days, the other for 10 days.  Adrianne always knew she wanted to have a family and has had exposure to adoption several times.  It was this exposure that led her to ask Robert, prior to marriage, if he would be open to adoption.  Of course we had no idea we would end up here, but we believe this is what was meant for us. 

Thank you for taking the time to get to know us a little.  We cannot begin to express our gratitude sufficiently and thank you for considering us as the parents to raise your baby.  But hopefully someday we will have the opportunity to meet and we will try to show you how grateful we are!