We appreciate spending time together and with family/friends in our leisure time, but also our time to spend time doing a hobby that's solely for us.

For example: we spend weekends throughout the year going away or visiting friends and family. Some of our favorite weekends in the summer are going to a cabin by a lake with our Wisconsin family, where we swim, go on boat or jet ski rides, tube or ski or paddleboard. Spending time outside and growing up as a family, at the campfire at night roasting s'mores and listening to music is a favorite pastime that we cannot wait to share with a child.

We also love spending time as an immediate family: going on bike rides to parks (especially with our dog in his own doggy backpack), exercising together, going on walks, meeting friends and family for meals in different parts of the city. We play video games together, board games, cook and listen to music together.

We also love to spend time together, but "do our own thing": Mike loves comic books, anime and video games. Luke loves to read, to play sports and spend time with his little brother through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. We can't wait to encourage our child to spend time doing the things they are passionate about. We will learn about and participate in their passions, but will also make sure they have space to do what they love to do, whether it be with other people or on their own.

Luke comes from a big extended family, so we have some annual traditions we love to participate in throughout the year:

Mike's family has so many traditions that we love to participate in and continue to build:

We've built and will continue to build traditions for our immediate family (Mike and Luke and Mojo), too:

Cultural diversity is important to us: everyone has a heritage and a history that should be explored, celebrated and put on display. And we believe that our family – and its potential mix of heritage and backgrounds – will celebrate this.

We won't shy away from acknowledging our differences, yet will also talk about what makes us alike as people and as a family and what makes us unique as people. If our family were to bring in a child of a different race or heritage, we'd work very hard to educate ourselves, would be sure that our community and the activities that we do reflect back the race of our child and never shy away from celebrating who they are and where they come from. We would not act like we can relate to every experience that the child's race will mean for them … but we will always, always learn and acknowledge what and how our child is feeling.

We live in a standalone building in a 3-floor townhouse in a quiet neighborhood in Chicago. Our house is on a side street, bordering a high school soccer field, a park and right in between two Chicago blocks that have restaurants, a public library, a community center with a park and an indoor pool, coffee shops, and lots of fun activities for families.

We share our building with two other families, both of whom have children (13, 9, 7 and 3). Our favorite thing about our house is that instead of cars in the garage we share with the other families, it's filled with kids' bikes. The kids love to play together and run between the three homes in our building! We love to spend time in the kitchen, cooking together and catching up on our days. We love to spend time in our family room, where we play games, read, watch movies and spend time together at night and on the weekends.

Our neighborhood has a lot to offer: schools and day cares in the area, family-friendly block parties and street festivals in the summer months, 3 parks that are in walking distance and we love to go to already with our puppy, Mojo, and friendly neighbors that look out for each other.

Our neighborhood is very bike-friendly. We love to bike and there are lots of bike-only lanes and residential streets where we can learn to bike together and travel, as a family, to the parks and awesome place we can enjoy when the weather is nice.

We are lucky to have three family communities that we spend time with and rely on for love and support: our Wisconsin family: Luke's parents, siblings and their spouses and our three nephews, ages 9, 7 and 5. We love to visit them, play board games and play outside, spend long weekends at lakehouses or at our parent's house for holidays. They visit us in Chicago, where we explore the city.

Our family in Metro Detroit, Mike's side; made up of cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents that we are very close to. Mike's side is the dog side: we get to let our puppy, Mojo, play with the other dogs in the family: Zeus, Shelby, Blossom, Elsa and Auggie. We love to play cards, play golf or try a new outdoor activity with the cousins. They come to visit us in Chicago, as well!

Our final family is the community we've built in Chicago: friends, former coworkers turned friends, neighbors and those who we spend time with. We love to host dinners and get-togethers, bike around the city, go to concerts and music festivals, try all of the street food festivals in Chicago in the summer and spend time together.

We cannot wait to bring a child into our families and all of our traditions: they'll get to play and grow up with our nephews and future nieces/nephews, learn all of our family traditions and card games, get tons of love and support from their aunts and uncles and grandparents and explore Chicago, explore our extended family's homes and neighborhoods and grow up with a big, supportive family.

First - thank you for considering us. We hope that the information we provided in our profile and in our video helped you get to know us a bit better; who we are as a family, why we're excited to grow our family through adoption and the type of home we'd provide to your child if you do choose us.

Since our first date 7 years ago, we knew that we both wanted to create a life that was filled with love, with joy and with full hearts. And every day leading up to getting married 3 years ago and every day since, we work hard to be loving, supportive and joyful together.

Adoption - and growing our family - is important to us because we have a lot of love to give to a child and nothing feels more fulfilling to us than to be able to be there for our kid to help them grow, to help them experience joy and happiness and learning and to be there for them in the hard times and to watch them triumph and to be proud of who they grow up to be.

We know that this journey isn't always easy, and that raising children isn't just about the good times. As a gay couple, we know firsthand how important and powerful it is to choose the people you have in your life and to choose, every day, to try to be happy and fulfilled.

And for us, being chosen by you would be the biggest honor that we would work to live up to every single day. We'll make mistakes. We won't be sure what to do sometimes. But we'd promise to have nothing but love, care and devotion to creating the best home we can and honor you and your child by trying to do what's right and always leading with our full hearts.

We've known that we want to be adoptive parents for a very long time. And our extended family - the aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and great-grandparents - are all filled with love that they cannot wait to pour onto the child that joins our family. If you were to choose us, we'd want you to know that there would be an entire community that would be surrounding your child with unconditional love and support for them each and every day.

We can't wait to introduce them to the things we love in life - like our family, playing games, our love for reading and for books and for playing sports and trying new things - and to make sure that they get to experience the things we loved about growing up: our family traditions like going bowling the day after Thanksgiving or learning to ski and swim with their grandparents and their cousins. And we can't wait to help them discover what they love and nurture it and learn about it and get as excited about their passions as they are.

We promise to always listen and encourage passion and curiosity and laughter. We promise to make sure that the values of kindness and honesty and creativity are a big part of their life. We promise to wipe away tears, to put band-aids on skinned knees, to listen and learn and love their personalities and the things they discover about life. And we promise to challenge them to be the kind and great person that we know they can be.

We'll want to hear from you about what you want and hope for them. We'll want to know what you picture for them in life and how you'd like to be involved. Or what you'd like us to share with them and tell them about their background and their heritage and their full family. And we'll honor your wishes and make sure that, no matter what, they know exactly how much they are loved by everyone in their life, including you. We'll commit to sharing pictures and letters and make sure that we maintain the relationship that you'd like to have. And that we help them understand how important their full family is.

Thank you for considering us. Thank you for opening your heart in this way. We hope that, from what you learned about us, you see how much love and support we'd provide to your child if you choose us.

Luke & Mike