Dear Birth Parent(s),

We are so excited to embark on this journey of becoming parents through adoption. We have the greatest admiration for you making the decision to offer your child life and having the bravery to consider placing your child into the loving arms of another couple. Our names are Matt and Amber and hopefully this letter and our pictures will give you an idea of what we are like and what life for your child would be like with us.

Our journey to becoming parents started in 2003 with the birth of our son. Shortly after he was born, a lot of unusual things started happening and Amber experienced some medical complications. We attempted to fix those problems, but the damage that was done was not repairable. Fast forward to now, and here we are writing this letter to you.

We honestly couldn't be more excited to meet you and become parents a second time around. Families are made so many different ways and having you and your child enter our world would just make our family so much more special. We really look forward to talking to you and meeting you, your family or anyone else in your life you'd like to introduce us to. We really want to learn as much as we can about the birthparents of the child we adopt, so that we have plenty of stories and tidbits to share with your baby as they grow older and more curious about you. Not only do we work with and live next door to couples who've adopted recently, we have cousins and friends our age who were adopted at birth. The neighbors who've adopted from overseas and our friends and relatives who were adopted as infants don't know a lot, or anything, about their birthparents. They have all been a great resource and support system in our desire to adopt and are very supportive of us knowing and sharing more about the birthparents of the child we adopt than they have available to them. We really want to hear what your wishes and dreams are for your child and hope to keep you a part of our lives through exchanging letters and pictures as they grow. Should you decide to place your child in our house, we will do what we can to make everyone's dreams for them a reality.

We also live a fairly comfortable lifestyle that would allow us the ability to meet every need of your child. Both of us do work outside the home at the same company, less than five minutes from our house. We are fortunate to have jobs that are extremely flexible. For example, one of us can go to work early, while the other works a little later, so we can spend more time with our children. One of us will take an extended lunch when the grandmas are watching our son to come home and visit, feed him lunch, read him a book, then put him down for a nap. For the other three days of the week, there is an excellent YMCA daycare/preschool across from our office where children are separated into classrooms with others their own age to interact and play. We know that because we both work, the time we have with our kids is very precious and it is filled with quality time and lots of personalized attention. The nice part about us both working is that it does allow us to have some nice "extras". We set aside a lot of our resources to provide for our family's future, things like retirement, college education, and traveling.

Our family believes in basic Christian values and the Christian faith. We think of our religion as being a great way to teach morals and values. It provides the foundation to teach character, honesty and integrity. We like simple concepts that deal with things as simple as treating others as you would like to be treated. What we gain most out of our religion, and what we'd like our children to get out of it is how to be a good person, make good decisions, and to reach out to those who are in need.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read our letter and weigh the decision about your child's future. Although we have been brought together for very different reasons, we hope we will be drawn together for the same very important little person. We really hope we can fulfill your desire to find a loving family for your child. You can be confident that if you place your child in our home, we will always have open arms and loving hearts for him or her. We will never take you or the decision you had to make for granted and consider your baby a gift that was given to us from you and from God both.

Matt & Amber