We love to travel! We typically go on at least 1 big trip each year as well as take a couple smaller ones. Our favorite types of smaller trips include weekend getaways “Up North” where we like to hike, explore smaller rural towns, and hangout by the lake. Our bigger trips are typically tropical. We both absolutely love going on Caribbean cruises. We have gone on 3 cruises in the past 3 years! Our favorite trip was probably the first cruise we took together as a couple. It was a 7-night Caribbean cruise. We visited various islands such as St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. We love taking tours and learning about the local life. It is so exciting to wake up each morning in a different location with a whole new area to explore.

Melvin enjoys walking around town and taking pictures of all the beautiful scenery. We like trying the local cuisine and shopping the local markets. We also enjoy the beach life! Kristin loves snorkeling! On one of our cruises Melvin chose a Sea Turtle excursion and we got to snorkel with Sea Turtles. It was a surreal experience! We are so grateful for the travel opportunities that we have had and we are so excited to share these experiences with our child!

When we have some free time, we enjoy going for walks and geocaching. We love the excitement and mystery of geocaching as well as the opportunity it provides for us to get outdoors. We also enjoy doing escape rooms and watching movies. We love a good mystery and we love playing board games too! It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise then that our favorite board game is Clue. We enjoy having game nights with our friends and families and grilling outside when the weather is nice. In addition to activities we enjoy doing together, we believe it is important to maintain individual interests and hobbies as well. Melvin is a major football fan! Go Pack Go! He participates in a Fantasy Football league each year and enjoys collecting football cards as well.. Kristin enjoys various arts and crafts. She has tried acrylic painting, knitting, cross-stitching, and working with clay, but some of her favorites include diamond painting and coloring.

We look forward to sharing many of these experiences with our child and also discovering new interests and hobbies as a family.

Kristin About Melvin: Melvin is a very caring individual. He is a great listener and puts a lot of thought into things before he speaks. He is very loyal and places great value on friends and family. Melvin’s personality really shines when he is around his loved ones and the contentment he feels when hanging out with family and friends is contagious in the very best way.

Melvin About Kristin: Kristin has so much love for her family. She goes above and beyond to make sure everything is good with them and if anything isn’t she will do everything in her power to fix whatever the issue is. Kristin is a child of God. Her resolve for us to find a way to attend church even on the occasional weekend when it doesn’t seem like it will fit into our schedules is admirable. I love that I found someone that cares for animals as much as I do. Kristin is also an avid game player and the two of us share a love of all kinds of games. From computer games to board games to card games and everything in between we love to play games with each other and with our family and friends.

Every week, typically on Sunday, we have a family dinner with Kristin’s side of the family. When it is all of us together, there are 11 of us. We take turns cooking and sometimes it turns into a bit of a potluck. There is lots of laughter, reminiscing, and sometimes a game or two. It is a time we look forward to each week.

Melvin’s family lives about 3 hours away. We go there a few times each year and his family comes to visit us as well. When we are visiting with Mel’s family we play lots of board games! It is almost guaranteed that we will learn a new game when we are all together. We also like to spend time outside chatting by the fire or playing yard games such as Kan Jam. Even when we can’t be together in person, we like to play games virtually using video chat.

Family is so important to both of us and we feel so fortunate that both of our families play such important roles in our lives. They are so excited for us as we go through this adoption journey and are eager to welcome a new member to our family to love and, of course, spoil!

We bought our home in 2017. Kristin grew-up a few miles from where we currently live and has family nearby. We have a 4 bedroom, 3 bath home with a beautiful fenced-in yard. We have lots of young families on our street and frequently see children riding by on their bikes or running back and forth between one another’s houses.

Our neighborhood is very family friendly. We have a private neighborhood Facebook group where people post all types of information from Girl Scout fundraising to coordinating scavenger hunts for the kids to reporting lost and found items. Every summer our neighborhood has a block party and the kids play outdoor games and have water balloon fights. The city fire department stops by with one of their big trucks and chats with the kids and even hoses them off! They absolutely love it! Each week during the summer there is an ice cream truck that stops on our block too. Such fun memories for all the kids!

We are walking distance to a great playground and activity fields. We have lots of paved trails nearby and some great splash pads and lakes. The library is also walking distance and we are a very short drive from our city mall which has a movie theater, restaurants, and a kids play area. We absolutely love our community and cannot imagine a better place to raise our child!

We are so honored and humbled that you have taken the time to read through our profile. We cannot imagine what you are feeling right now but we are amazed by your strength. As a birth parent, you are already trying to find a way to provide the best possible life for your child. That is such a selfless gift of love and one that we would try to live up to every day.

We are so excited and eager to become parents. We have been together for 4 1/2 years and married for just over 3 of those years. We discussed our desire to become parents well before we got married. We even discussed the possibility of adoption if things did not work out for us to have biological children. We both agreed that what we wanted most was a child to love, share our life with, and to watch grow into an amazing and unique person. We believe that it is love that makes a family, not biology.

We both grew up in homes that modeled the importance of family and being present for each other. As parents, we want to be active in our child’s life. We want to watch their first steps, teach them to throw a ball, cheer them on at school concerts/plays/sports, attend parent/teacher conferences, host their first sleepover, and so many other things. We also know there will be tough times and it will be just as important for us to be present during those times. Hugging our child after their first fall, helping them study for a test, listening to them talk about their first breakup, we intend to stand with our child through it all. We will guide our child as best we can as they grow into a smart and caring adult.

Though being present will be an essential part of raising our child we are also able to provide our child with other important things such as a good education, financial security, marital stability, and a strong Christian foundation. We are very fortunate to have stable jobs and enough resources to put money into savings and retirement and someday into an account for our child. Melvin also has the flexibility to work from home which could prove to be very useful throughout our child’s school years. We plan on raising our child in the Christian faith. God is an important part of our lives and we want our child to know His love from a young age.

We also want to give our child the opportunity to know their birth parent(s), and we understand that the communication needs of the birth parent(s) may change over time. We are open to exchanging emails and pictures and even video-chatting. We are also open to the possibility of future visits. If you choose us to parent your child, we can promise you that our goal will be to provide the best possible life for them, to make sure they never doubt how much they are loved, and to make sure they always have a place they can call home.

Whatever path you end up choosing, we pray that it fills you with peace and is the best path for both you and your child.

Melvin & Kristin