American Adoptions -- America's Adoption Agency

At the Beach in North Carolina

Our favorite vacation spot is a North Carolina beach where the water is warm and the horizon goes on forever. Meredith's family has been traveling to the same house for 20 years. It is a place for family gatherings and has hosted mini family reunions where people travel near and far to sit on the deck, feast and catch up with each other. The beach is not crowded so there is ample room for the family to spread out. We sit in beach chairs or on a beach towel and we set up a big tent for those that enjoy shade. There are always lots of kids on the beach making sand castles and playing games. We go for long walks along the water, picking out sea shells and interesting rocks. We pack our swimsuits and many books to read and prepare to relax. Last year, we played mini-golf together one night and then had ice-cream on the way home. Another year, we had the greatest game of Monopoly ever where one of the family had just a few dollars left and then came back to win the game. Michael has been known to bring his basketball and play hoops at the local park near the town center. Overall, it is a vacation that allows us to visit with family and recharge. Meredith and Michael both grew up going to the beach and can't wait to share this experience with our future family.

Michael is a Huge Baseball Fan - We Traveled to San Diego to See the Red Sox Play and Visited with Meredith's Cousin

We work hard Monday through Friday so we treasure our leisure time on the weekend. We attend church each Sunday and get involved with church-related activities such as delivering holiday meals to families our church sponsors and helping the youth group raise money for its missions. Sunday afternoons and weekday mornings are spent reading, whether it is a book from the library, one of our magazines or the local paper. We take walks when it is warm, play on the computer when it is not and have game nights every once in a while. We have all the usual games: Monopoly, Life, Scrabble, Boggle and more. Michael spends a great deal of time researching his family lineage and has traveled to Canada and the mid-west to visit distant relatives and make connections. Michael is a huge Boston Red Sox fan and we make several trips annually to Fenway Park in Boston to see them play. Meredith is a movie buff, so we watch a wide-array of movies on weekend nights. During the summer, Meredith spends many hours outdoors in the garden where she has cultivated many varieties of flowers that provide beautiful summertime color. We like to travel when we can, mostly to see our families in North Carolina, Massachusetts and New York, but have taken trips to Puerto Rico, London, Dublin, Seattle and San Diego in the past few years.

We have both been touched by adoption growing up in many ways. Meredith's best friend is a child of an open adoption. While his birth mother did not raise him, they are still very close and talk weekly as most parents do with their children. Meredith also babysat children who were adopted as infants. It was a just part of who they were, never a secret and never considered a negative. The families were very open about it and Meredith read children's books to each child about adoption as they grew older. Meredith also has distant cousins who were adopted from India. She sees them at family reunions and on Facebook.

Michael had a girlfriend in college who was adopted internationally and never knew her birth parents. She had an extremely loving family with an adopted brother and incredible parents, who raised them to be proud of who they were and where they came from. Michael was nervous when first meeting her parents, not only because they were the loving, protective parents of his girlfriend and he wanted to impress them, but also because they were adoptive parents and it was a new experience for him. After that first encounter, he was never nervous again because they were such loving people who loved you for who you were. Michael became very comfortable with the idea of adoption ever since and knew that if the situation arose, he would emulate her parents as much as he could.