If we were you, we would be wondering why our family wants to adopt and what our journey has been to get to adoption. We love our current life, and are very happy. We have been married for 8 years. Our son Sam is 7 years old. However, it feels like something is missing and we want to share our time with another child.

We decided that adoption was the right choice for us after going down a long road of infertility. We got pregnant quickly with our first child, but it was not the same with our hopeful second child. We have tried to get pregnant for 6 years without success and have talked about adoption for a long time. We think it would be the greatest honor to be able to raise another child. Once we decided on adoption, it made the pain from infertility go away and changed the outlook to hope and joy. We are very comfortable and excited about our decision. Our son is also very excited and has been asking for a sibling for years. Sam will be an amazing big brother, he is such a special kind-hearted kid. He's already talking about how he will help with the baby and make them laugh. We value family and relationships and want him to have a sibling to spend the rest of his life with.

Rachel is a female general surgeon which makes her unique while the surgical field in the past was predominately male surgeons. Her patients enjoy her compassionate approach and excellent surgical skills. Rachel works 4.5 days a week and has all nights and weekends off. Her schedule is flexible and she is able to attend our son's activities.

Brady was an environmental scientist before he decided to stay home. He checked the ground water to make sure it was safe and chemicals were not leaking into the ground water. Brady is excellent at remodeling, he can fix almost anything and has done a lot of home improvement projects.

Our morning starts with Rachel drinking coffee and snuggling with Sam. Then Rachel goes to work and Sam goes to school. While Rachel is a surgeon, she has a flexible schedule and comes home for lunch every day. Brady stays home and works on remodeling projects. When we get home we frequently go to Sam's activities such as: Boy Scouts, soccer, football, basketball, and baseball. We also do homework for the night, read and have bath time.

In our free time, we enjoy swimming, golfing, going to movies, going to the park, visiting the zoo, traveling and visiting family. Brady also likes to play video games with Sam. Rachel enjoys making scrapbooks of Sam's life and already has a scrapbook ready for the new baby. (She made 3 scrapbooks for Sam's first year of life!) We spend time with our cats and they hang out with us when we watch TV. We spend a lot of time with family. We have certain trips that we have enjoyed so much that we do them every year. This summer we would all go to the rec center and Rachel would meet Brady and Sam on her lunch break.

We live in a neighborhood on a cul-de-sac with a golf course behind the backyard. There are a lot of kids in our neighborhood, and our son has many friends he plays with.

Our town has many kids activities. Our son enjoys: soccer, basketball and basketball camp, art camp, baseball, football, music lessons, swimming team, and cooking camp. There is also a children's museum. The art museum has weekly kids art classes. There is an indoor and outdoor pool. We are also members of the YMCA that has a lot of children's programs.

Brady's mom and step dad live about an hour away and visit frequently.

We love our community and we cannot wait to share it with another child!

We are very close with our families. Brady's mom, step-dad and brother live nearby. Rachel's cousins live in Iowa and we see them frequently, they have 12 kids in total. Rachel has 2 aunts and uncles that also live in Iowa. We see our extended family when we go to Kansas City. Rachel has two aunts that live in Wisconsin that come to watch Sam play his sports and we visit them as well.

We have many family traditions. We typically go to Rachel's cousin's home for Easter. Our extended family is there and Sam plays with his 12 cousins. On Mother's Day we go to Rachel's aunt's home and we all go to the city-wide garage sales. For the 4th of July we swim all day and then watch the fireworks. We go to the Wilderness Resort Waterpark in the Wisconsin Dells with Rachel's aunts in the summer. The Iowa State Fair is also very popular with our family, we went 4 times last year! Sam likes the giant slide and ski lift ride. Rachel and Brady love the corndogs. The first weekend of December we always go to Kansas City and go to a hotel downtown that's connected to a mall with an aquarium and Lego Land. Then we go to a Chiefs game. After that we stay the Great Wolf Lodge waterpark. In the fall we like to go to different pumpkin patches—we went to 4 last year! All of our different traditions makes our family unique.

Our family is very excited to hopefully be welcoming a new member to our family soon! They have all been very supportive and interested in the adoption process. They have been asking a lot of questions and asking how they can help with the process.

We cannot image the decisions you are currently facing. We would like to provide you comfort and thank you for considering the enormous gift of adoption. We want to assure you that we will provide the best life possible for a child. We cannot guarantee perfection, but we will do our best.

We have provided unconditional love, support and encouragement for our son, Sam, and would like to do that for another child. Anyone can write these words, but we think the best example of how a person will act is their previous actions. At baseball tryouts the coach told us our son was the happiest kid he has met. This is what we are striving for, going along the journey of life with our children and supporting them along the way.

We can't imagine the pressure of considering adoption for your unborn child. There must be so many things to consider and you want to make the right decision. One of the ways that we are different is that we truly put our child's welfare before our own needs on a daily basis. Before Sam was born we spent hours researching the safest baby car seats and bought the best one. Rachel breastfed him, despite needing to scrub out of surgeries and find someone to replace her so that she could pump. When he started eating baby food, we made him organic baby food. We have enrolled him in every activity he is interested in. We researched the best schools, and we have been saving for his college since he was born. He has multiple college accounts and will be able to pick the college of his choice and not have any student loans. After Sam was born, Brady quit his job so that he could spend more time with Sam. We want to do this for your child as well.

We want our children to feel loved and have the confidence they need to succeed in the world. This includes providing emotional support and unconditional love. We want home to be a safe place for our children, where they feel physically healthy and emotionally safe. We make sure Sam knows he is loved unconditionally, and we would do that for your child, as well.

Your needs are important to us and we want to respect your decision for how much contact we have after the adoption. We can see the benefits to a child with having an open adoption, but if you aren't comfortable with that, we understand your decision. We plan to send as many letters and pictures as the birth parent(s) desire. We plan to talk about adoption from an early age, so that it is a normal feeling for the child and not a big surprise in the future. It would be nice for the child to know their birth parents and be able to ask them questions about their family.

We hope that regardless of your decision you find comfort and support on your journey.

Sincerely,

Brady & Rachel