Hello and thank you for looking at our profile! We understand that if you choose adoption, you want your baby to have loving parents and a wonderful home. If you wish for us to parent your child, we would be thrilled to welcome your baby into our family. Your child will fit right in with an older brother adopted from Guatemala and close family members adopted from Korea, Colombia and the United States.

Dave Julie Job Description Computer Software Engineer Stay-at-Home Parent Education Masters in Computer Science BA in Anthropology Favorites Hobby Rock Climbing Hobby Reading Song Writer John Lennon Song Writer Bono Sport to Play Soccer Sport to Play Air Hockey Vacation Spot Big Island of Hawaii Vacation Spot Hawaii Video Game The Legend of Zelda Video Game Super Bust-a-Move Children Graham-2 years old

It was a natural choice for us to adopt children of a different race. We know any child we adopt will be warmly welcomed by our family, friends, and neighborhood, and we have already seen that happen with our son Graham, who is of Latino heritage. We adopted our son Graham from Guatemala when he was 6 months old. We got to visit him in Guatemala when he was 4 months old, and then we traveled again to bring him home. We loved our time in Guatemala, and traveled throughout Guatemala City and Antigua. We feel it is important to maintain a connection to Guatemala, so we have attempted to learn Spanish, and learn the history of Guatemala. Guatemala is a very poor country with very few social services and little opportunity for education, and we feel it is important to help out the people there as much as we can. We are now sponsoring a little girl in Guatemala to go to school, and we're helping to support her family members with health care and other critical items.

Our extended family is a blend of various races and ethnicities, and our friends are also a diverse group of individuals from China, India, and elsewhere. We are fully committed to ensuring that our children attend ethnically diverse schools, where they don't feel like they have to stand out just because of their skin color.

We both enjoy learning about other cultures. Dave has traveled around Europe and Latin America for fun and for work. Julie majored in anthropology in college because she was interested in studying people and their cultures. Soon after college, Julie lived in the Congo, Africa for several months, while caring for orphaned young chimpanzees at a remote wildlife sanctuary. It was an exciting and unique opportunity to experience another culture and learn another language (French).

Through our life experiences, we feel that we can help our children thrive in a multiracial family and develop an appreciation for all types of people.

We've educated ourselves on good ways to introduce adoption to children, and how to do it at the age-appropriate time. At age 2, Graham knows that he was born in Guatemala, and he responds happily any time his birth country is mentioned in conversation. We often tell him the story of how he was born in Guatemala, cared for by his foster family, and then Mama and Daddy came to adopt him and bring him home forever. We also are collecting children's books about adoption - his current favorite is "A Mother for Choco", which is about a bird adopted by a bear family. As Graham gets older, we'll share more information about his birth family and the circumstances of his adoption. Our goal is to be completely open about sharing all of the information we have about our children's adoptions. We also want to ensure that our children understand our positive feelings about adoption, and about their birth families and cultures.

We think it's important for our children to know that adoption is a perfectly normal and common way to build a family. We've become close with many other adoptive families, and are pleased that many of these families are in our everyday lives. Graham has friends who were also adopted from Guatemala in his preschool class and at library story time.

Daddy and Graham Reading

Our two-year-old son Graham is a cheerful little ball of energy. He is up every day at dawn and ready for the next adventure to begin. We try our best to keep up! He inspires us to seek out new activities to enjoy with him, because he is so enthusiastic about everything in life.

Graham is very imaginative, and his latest game is what we call "Graham's Cooking Show" (based on the Food Network shows, we believe). He seats us at a little table, then uses his play kitchen and play food to whip up batches of cookies, hot tea, and macaroni and cheese. He is a rather eccentric chef, and if he decides he doesn't want a particular ingredient, he flings it dramatically over his shoulder. If we clap at the end, he bows and says "Thank you! Thank you!" He loves to help us in our real kitchen too - as soon as we start to cook, he pulls a chair up to the counter and says, "Me help Mama (or Daddy) cook!" He and Mama recently made delicious Halloween cookies together, though some of the candy toppings mysteriously did not make it to the cookies.

We predict that he will be a lot of fun as a big brother, always inventing new games and imaginative things to do!