After waiting almost 3 years, we adopted our first child, Aurora. She's a smart, active, independent child, and she's very excited to be a big sister!

We also have cousins who adopted alongside us. They placed two months before we did, but it was nice to have someone else to talk to about the process. Now Aurora and James are growing up together and have one another to talk to about their adoption experiences. Laura and Pat are actually adopting another child, as well, so there will be 4 adopted children in the family!

We have a very open adoption with our daughter's birth family. We have a text thread that includes both her birth parents and her birth grandma. We send them letters periodically via email, with a link to pictures and videos. And we have in-person visits from time to time. We have had video calls and even send packages and artwork in the mail for mothers' and fathers' days, etc. She's even met her birth grandparents and great grandparents. Both of her birth parents and birth grandma even attended her adoption finalization!

Our relationship with them developed very naturally, and they really feel like our third family now. We are looking forward to developing and maintaining an open adoption with our next child's birth family, whatever it may look like!

Danny's background is in education, and he's spent over a decade working with children from toddlers up to fourth grade. Between his natural gift for working with kids, and his years of training and experience, he quickly became known as the teacher to call whenever a child needed some extra support and attention, and these were often his favorite students!

He's now a full-time toddler assistant, personal tutor, and stay-at-home parent to Aurora, and the two of them have an almost endless list of projects, games, and activities that are both fun and educational! We plan on continuing this with our second child, and Danny plans on going back to work once both kids are settled in school.

On the other hand, Mike is much better with machines and computers. He's a software engineer, and considers himself lucky that he gets to play with computers and solve complex puzzles all day. His favorite days are when a co-worker asks, "hey, something weird is going on, can you take a look?" and he once broke Newark Airport for a whole morning!

He works from home, which makes it easy to take snack time or story breaks with Aurora, or to work from the road while visiting family or friends. He's also worked as a technical writer, a teaching assistant, a handyman, a tutor, and pretty much any job you can name in restaurants.

We live in a very diverse Midwestern city, and our neighborhood is a mix of people and families from a variety of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and we want to ensure our children attend schools that also reflect that diversity.

We're planning on sending them to one of several local language immersion schools, to ensure they have exposure to different languages. Mike and our daughter Aurora are in the process of getting their Italian citizenship, and we're hoping to give our children the opportunity to study or live abroad in the future, if they want to.

Our circle of friends is intentionally diverse, offering our family a broader perspective on the world. We believe in teaching our children that differences are what make life interesting, and that no one culture is superior to another. As members of a queer parents' group, we actively engage in a community that celebrates various family structures, providing a supportive space for us and our children.

We live in a very diverse, urban neighborhood near the city's second biggest park, which is actually where we had our first date together in 2007! It hosts numerous cultural events throughout the year and is home to the city's Botanical Gardens. There is even a large farmer's market every Saturday, and during the summertime months, it hosts Food Truck Fridays. Our neighborhood is also home to its own orchard! We take frequent family walks there to eat cherries, peaches, and even grapes.

We bought our home in 2022, and we are so happy to have the opportunity to raise our children here. They have their own rooms, we have a guest room for Mike's family to stay in, a nice backyard with a garden where we grow tomatoes, beans, and flowers with our child, a workshop in the basement, and even a storm watching balcony! Our children even have their very own playroom on the first floor right off the kitchen and living room, so they can play safely while we cook lunch and dinner.

Family is very important to us, and we both come from very big ones. There are a number of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and Aurora's birth family that are eagerly awaiting the arrival of our second child.

We see Mike's family multiple times a year when they come to stay with us to visit, and we go out to NYC to visit them during the summer and for Thanksgiving. We also have regular video calls with Nana and Nono (Mike's parents), which Aurora loves because Nana (a retired preschool teacher!) always has fun new songs to teach us!

Danny's family all lives near us, so we're able to meet up every Tuesday with Grandma for trips to the zoo, science center, or just exploring the city. We share holidays between Danny's siblings' houses, and we also meet up together to do things like Easter egg hunts, trips to the pumpkin patch, and apple picking. Danny's cousin adopted a child two months before us, so we often get together with them so that our kids will be close with another cousin that also has an adoption story. For instance, neither of us were busy one Sunday, so we met up at the new Bass Pro Shop that opened near us!

Thank you for considering adoption, and for taking the time to get to know us. We know that this is a difficult and emotional time for you, and we want you to know how much we respect you, and we know that you only want the best for your baby.

We met in 2007, at a party that neither of us really wanted to go to, and quickly realized we were meant to be together! A few months after we started dating, Danny was spending two months living in France for school, and Mike decided he'd tag along! In the 15 years since then, we've rarely been apart for more than a few days at a time. We were engaged after about 5 months, but at the time we weren't allowed to get married, so we spent time fighting for our rights at local marriage equality protests.

We eventually moved to New York City to be closer to Mike's family. It was actually wanting to start a family that led us to pursue our marriage in the end. We realized that a big ceremony wasn't that important to us, so long as our family and friends could make it, and we would be able to start our family together.

We've always known that we wanted to be parents, and since we can't have kids by ourselves, adoption was always a "first choice" for us. While the process has been a little awkward and challenging at times, we've learned to be open to whatever it brings (especially the unfiltered questions from the kids in our lives!).

In 2022, after waiting for almost 3 years, we found out that we had been chosen by our daughter's birth parents, and just 10 days later, she was born! We got the first picture of our daughter when we walked through the door of our hotel room, and we both started crying -- she was so beautiful! We got to meet her and her birth parents face-to-face for the first time the night she was born. Of course, we were all very nervous, but we got more comfortable as we began talking about the new baby. We took turns caring for Aurora during her stay in the hospital, and were able to spend time getting to know each other a bit better. We also got to meet more members of her birth family, and met up a couple more times before we left town to go home for the first time.

It was through talking to Aurora's birth family when we began to really understand that adoption is both happy and sad at times. We were so happy that we were taking home the baby that we've been waiting almost 3 years for, while her birth parents were losing the baby that they loved and had been a part of their life for 9 months. We both felt very grateful for each other in this situation, and really understood the importance of continued contact.

We've remained close with not just her birth parents, but also her grandparents and great-grandparents, and they've become another part of the extended family. We see them a couple times a year, we have a text thread where we share news, pictures, and videos, send each other mail and presents, have had a few video calls, and they even came to visit for Aurora's 1st birthday party! We are happy that Aurora will grow up knowing who her birth family is, and that she'll be able to understand who she is and where she comes from.

We know that all adoptions are different, and that relationships often change and evolve over time, but we hope that if you choose us, you'll continue to be a part of your child's life, and our lives. Whether that means in-person visits, video calls, emails, text messages, or just pictures and letters, please know that your time with your child doesn't end when they're placed with us. It's just the beginning of a life with another branch on the family tree, and we're looking forward to developing what that life looks like with you.

Danny & Mike