We have quite a few hobbies we want to include our children in. We love to travel as a family and explore the world. We believe it's important to include our children in our travel plans because we want them to grow up with a love for experiences, not just things.

We enjoy backpacking and camping as a family (dogs included). Being in nature is a great way to bond free of technology. We believe nature is the greatest playground for kids of all ages. We also like to bike through our neighborhood as a family. Joel puts the dogs on a leash, and they pull his bike. Megan connects her bike to the child trailer where the kids can ride in until they are old enough to ride bikes of their own.

We also love art and often have afternoons where we sit together and draw or paint. We look forward to drawing and painting with our children and watching them blossom creatively. Joel loves to build things and cannot wait to have little helpers on projects. He wants his kids to be handy and capable of good craftsmanship. Megan loves reading and writing. She has a passion for words and stories, and she wants her children to cultivate wonderfully vivid imaginations.

Cultural diversity is a beautiful thing. We believe all people are created uniquely and wonderfully by God. While we want to introduce our child to our cultural traditions, we also want to introduce his/her own cultural traditions. The knowledge of both cultures is important for our child to create a sound identity. There are beautiful things in all cultures, and we ourselves have the desire to learn and adopt ideas from other cultures alongside our child.

We have been blessed with friends, coworkers, and students of different races and cultural backgrounds. We have friends and families in our church who have adopted children of different races than their own. We plan to include those people in our child's life so he/she has others to relate to.

We want to raise our children to love, respect, and treat all people with kindness regardless of their cultural background. We want our children to be aware of different cultures and traditions so they are not narrow-minded and ethnocentric. We believe that in embracing each other's differences, we can better love one another.

We have a one-year-old daughter named Emerson. She is 100% a people person; she rarely meets a stranger. She loves to share her toys and food and to play with other children, especially her cousins (an 8-year-old and 4-year-old twins).She loves to be outside, on the go, and with her puppies. We try to introduce her to our hobbies and take her places often because we want to model for her a life filled with passion and adventure.

Because Emerson loves so deeply, we know she will ADORE having a sibling. Our desire in adopting while she is so young is to create an unbreakable sibling bond between the two. We cannot wait to watch them learn and grow together!

We are blessed to be surrounded by our families. Joel's parents (Grand and Papa) live about 15 minutes from us, and Megan's parents (T and Pop Pop) live about 10 minutes from us. Our siblings live nearby too. We see our families at least once a week.

At Grand and Papa's house, we talk, play board games, and eat family meals. We never leave their house without laughing at least once. We have deep, meaningful conversations, and fun Christmas festivities. Each year, we get hot chocolate and drive around town looking at Christmas lights. Grand and Papa are very supportive of our adoption. They LOVE being grandparents and cannot wait to love on their future grandbaby! Joel's extended family is just as excited to add a new family member to the group.

At T and Pop Pop's house we play outside, talk on the screened-in porch, and play in the toy closet. We get to see Megan's extended family there often, which is amazing! We have a lot of fun together and are incredibly close knit. For Christmas, we have a "Gag Gift Party" each year, where we trade funny presents and laugh about them for hours. T and Pop Pop are wonderful grandparents. They are already making plans for when their next grandbaby arrives. Megan's family is incredibly supportive of adoption and eager to add another family member into the fun.

We live in the suburbs in Alabama. Our neighborhood is incredible! It is sandwiched between a small mountain with a creek and a greenway with a playground, a creek, walking paths, and a dog park. Our neighbors are the friendliest people. Next door, there is an older couple who comes outside whenever they see us to say hi. They bring us vegetables from their garden, dog treats for our boys, and toys and goodies for our little girl. Our other neighbors have 3 children, ages 7 and up. They are always playing outside in their tree house, on their trampoline, or on the ropes courses their dad made them. One of Joel's friends from college lives across the street. We are surrounded by wonderful people!

Our house is two stories. It is light yellow with a porch that wraps around the front. We love to sit on the front porch in our rocking chairs! Upstairs, we have 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. Downstairs, we have a dining room, living room, kitchen, and laundry room. In the winter, we spend most of our time in the living room. Joel makes us fires in the wood fireplace, and we can read, talk, play, or watch movies next to the fire. In the summer, we spend most of our time outside. Joel built us a beautiful back deck, and we love it. We also have a trampoline with a net and a swing set with a slide in our backyard.

Our names are Joel and Megan. We have been married for 3.5 years. We have a sweet 16-month-old daughter and two lovable dogs. Family is extremely important to us, and we are excited to grow our family! We love that we will have children close in age because it will allow for them to share more life experiences and memories. We believe those shared experiences and memories will form a tighter sibling bond between them and create a lifelong friendship. They will get to learn and grow together, which is so special.

Before we say anything else, we want you to know that you are an amazing, kind-hearted, and strong woman. We may not know you yet, but the fact that your child's best interest is at heart says a lot about you. We admire you for your bravery.

We want to be here for you and comfort you in this time in any way we can. We are open to communication and post-adoption visits, and we will certainly send you letters and pictures of the child! Your traditions are a part of the child's heritage, and we want to learn about those traditions so they can become a part of our own, and we can then teach them to our children.

We want you to know that we will love your child with every fiber of our being. We are committed to raising the child in an environment filled with God's love, laughter, adventure, and a good education. We want the child to know God's love and to share that love with the world. We don't want a day to pass without seeing the child's smile or hearing the child's laugh. Even if it takes us doing something silly and ridiculous, we want our children to experience joy every single day.

As for adventure, we look forward to exploring places we've never been as a family. We also hope to cultivate an adventurous imagination in the child where the stories we read come to life and the swing set becomes a castle or a ship, and we can laugh and play make believe together.

As for the good education, we will do everything in our power to ensure the child receives the best possible education. We believe that reading to a child early on can create better communication and language skills, and we plan to read to the child from the very beginning. We want the child to be equipped to follow his/her dreams, wherever those dreams may lead, and we believe math, science, English, literature, and art are all of great importance. We also believe team sports and clubs are important for children to grow socially so we plan on getting the child involved in those.

We desire for our children to grow up knowing they have parents who believe in them and would do anything for them. We desire for our children to know they have parents who genuinely want to hear their stories and be a part of their lives. And we desire for you to know that your child will be wrapped in loving arms every single day.

Love,

Joel & Megan