Dear Birth Parent(s),

Thank you so much for viewing our profile. We can only imagine how difficult the decision you are considering is, to place your child for adoption. We pray that God will be with you to comfort you and help you through this difficult decision. Raising our daughter Emily has been the greatest joy in our lives. We have always hoped to have another child to complete our family. Cindy experienced serious complications with Emily's delivery and was reluctant to risk a second pregnancy for several years. When we were finally ready to attempt a second pregnancy, we discovered we had secondary infertility. We would be truly blessed if you would choose us to adopt your child.

When Emily was born Cindy made the decision to be a stay-at-home mom, and will continue to do so. This has given Cindy the opportunity to be very involved in all aspects of Emily's life. We expect to participate in your child's life the same way, doing things like participating in play groups, volunteering at school, leading scout troops, and driving car pool to whatever activities your child enjoys and want to participate in. We believe it is important to expose a child to a large number of activities to help him/her find what they enjoy and are good at, and we expect to give your child every opportunity to find out what his/her passions are.

Parenting our daughter has been the most fulfilling experience we have had. We've devoted most of our time and energy to helping her to learn and grow, and have found our greatest joy to be when we see her succeed in something that we have worked with her on.

We view our primary responsibility as parents to be teachers. Our job will be to teach your child what he/she will need to know to be able to succeed as an adult. At the same time we need to give your child the courage, self-awareness, and self-confidence to be able to be himself/herself and stand up for what he/she believes in.

One of our strengths as parents has been our passion and commitment to being a parent. Parenting isn't work to us, it is something we enjoy and look forward to. Another strength has been our consistency. We both have very common values and we share a common approach to parenting. This has helped our daughter since she gets the same message and treatment from both of us. It also helps strengthen our marriage since we are working together towards a common goal and not fighting each other with different approaches to parenting.

We believe there are two important things that make our marriage strong: our faith and our friendship. We have been married for over 20 years now and knew each other for 10 years prior to that. The fact that we were friends before we started dating has really strengthened our relationship. Our faith has also played a major role in keeping our marriage special. We know that God loves us and wants our marriage to endure. That knowledge, along with the 30-plus year friendship we have, makes our marriage one that we know will last.

There are two kinds of sounds that people can always hear in our house: music and laughter! Music is a passion that we share, and has extended into Emily's drum playing. Even more than music, laughter is a sound that is always heard in our house. We are constantly joking, playing, and having fun. Emily's friends always enjoy coming over to our house because they know they will have fun.

We love to play games and look forward to teaching games, sharing hobbies and activities with your child, especially the ones that had an impact on us during our childhoods. Cindy has always loved to play games. As a child, she played card games, board games, outdoor games and also enjoyed doing puzzles. Every winter, we still bring out puzzles and look forward to doing them as a family during those long winter nights. And as for games, we currently have a whole closet full of them. We love to play family games and can't wait to share that enjoyment of game playing with your child. Mike loves to watch and play most sports. He especially likes to play baseball, basketball and volleyball.

We commit to you to make sure that you have the information you desire (letters, pictures, etc.) to see your child grow up through the years. One of a child's greatest needs is to know that their parents love them, and we will make every effort to make sure your child knows how much you love him/her. We understand that this is a vitally important part of helping a child grow up with a sense of security, and we expect that it is also important to you to know that your child will have a positive view of the love you have for them.

Once again, we thank you for taking the time to review our profile and to considering giving us the honor of raising your child. May God bless you through this difficult process.

Mike & Cindy