Our main tradition is based around Thanksgiving. Every year we host Thanksgiving and invite our closest friends. We always start at about 7am and make it a full day of cooking and having fun together. We eat around two in the afternoon and then start the tradition. It begins with a pumpkin pie that our friend Danielle makes from scratch every year. Then we play all of our favorite board games and video games including Jenga, Phase 10, and Guitar Hero. This typically lasts well into the night and we finish the day by watching a Christmas movie. Everyone will stay the night and then in the morning we go to our favorite breakfast place down the road. This is always a great event and we love doing it every year with our friends.

To us our friends are our family. We have four very close friends that we do everything with including this tradition. They are all incredibly excited to help us welcome a child into our lives. We can’t wait to add a child to this tradition and to build new ones together as a family.

Last year we purchased some property in Kansas in order to fulfill our dream of restarting RJ's family farm. It has become our favorite place to visit and we have enjoyed creating memories there. It is 153 acres with about 80 acres of farmland and the Smoky River runs through the property. We love camping on the property and watching the multiple types of wildlife that live there. The property is home to deer, turkey, and multiple smaller animals such as rabbits and opossums. The fishing on the property is one of the most memorable and exciting parts of the property. The river is home to large catfish and carp, and it’s the perfect place for a float on hot summer days. We were able to string a rope across the river so you can sit in your tube without floating away. There are also multiple sandy beaches on the property that are perfect for building sand castles and playing with all the beach toys!

Our hopes for this adoption are for your child to know where they come from and that they are very loved by everyone. We want the child's adoption story to be their favorite story they hear at bedtime and ask about their birth parents with excitement and love. Having an open adoption is important to us because we want to ensure the child knows their story and not look at their adoption as a secret part of their life. With the open adoption we also hope to create a relationship with you. Trusting us with your child is a large step and it creates an instant bond. We want this bond to become a lifelong friendship which will help create a strong foundation for the child. Our hopes with this strong foundation we will create is that the child will know they are loved and cared for by everyone involved.

Both of our families are excited for the new addition to the family. This child will be the first Grandchild and will be very loved by everyone in our extended family.

Jenny's family is very close and live close enough to visit occasionally. We also have the tradition of having a large family reunion every two years where everyone on Jenny's side of the family gets together for at least a week in different parts of the country. The last vacation was in Hawaii! During this trip we were able to swim with turtles and hike up a volcano! For this hike we woke up at 3am and when we got to the summit we couldn't see anything through the clouds. It was a very memorable family experience!

RJ's parents live even closer and we visit with them at least every other weekend. RJ's extended family mainly lives in Maryland, so trips to the east coast are common for our family. Our four legged babies, Kimber and Ruger, are very excited to extend our family. Ruger in particular loves to snuggle and loves attention. Our families cannot wait to be a part of the child's life, and are very excited to love and spoil this bundle of joy with hugs and kisses!

We live in a very small community in the country. We own a nice home with plenty of room to grow our family. We have three acres of field and love having the view from our porch of our field and the mountains beyond it. We love to garden and have gardens surrounding our home with fruits, vegetables, and flowers. We live across the street from the town’s baseball field that is used for all the high school games. We have a perfect view from our deck and love watching the games. We love picturing a play set and a sand box in our backyard for our kids to play in. We have so much room to run and create lifelong memories.

There is always something going on in our small town including our favorite, Bailey Day's. This is a very old fashioned type of gathering which celebrates the small local businesses and culture of our valley. Everyone gets dressed up in their old western clothes and bonds with their community members. We also live just a short 45 minutes from the city where we take advantage of going to the zoos, museums, and water parks. Our favorite thing to do in the city during Christmas time is to drive through the light shows and the various communities to look at all the lights. Our home is a few miles from the schools which are smaller allowing for smaller class sizes and better education. Our neighbors have high school aged children and they are very excited to play with a new baby in the neighborhood.

Our relationship started when we first met in middle school. We grew up in the same small town and our lives have been intertwined ever since. We started dating our senior year of high school and were married two years later in 2013. We continued to grow together and this helped create the strong marriage that we have today.

RJ has his dream job of being a hunting guide. He loves the outdoors and loves meeting new people. Through his job we have created a lot of lifelong friendships and met some amazing people. Most of the people that we have met have children and we have loved watching a family grow through the love they have for a child.

Jenny is a Senior Staff Accountant at a credit union and is very passionate about the credit union movement. She began her career four years ago as a teller and worked her way up to her current position. She is currently in the succession planning to be CFO and looks forward to the new challenges it will bring. Our jobs are very flexible and as we add to our family we will work with our jobs to ensure we are present to care for this child in every aspect of their life.

When we first began trying to expand our family we were filled with hope and excitement. We tried to conceive for about seven years before we decided that adoption is what God had in store for our family. Along that journey we went through a lot of ups and downs but adoption has brought our hope and excitement back and we are very excited to start our family.

We are very anxiously awaiting the opportunity to add to our family and are excited to provide your child with a strong loving home. We believe that our strong marriage will help us provide the best life for your child and we cannot wait to share our love with your child. We will be thrilled to introduce your child to our family and have our family's spoil and love the child every day of their life. We dream of the day we can bring the child to our property in Kansas and have the child come to the family reunions we have in different parts of the country. We also look forward to all the activities we can do at home and in the city near us such as experiencing the zoo and aquariums.

We are happy to help you be as involved in your child's life as you want to be. You are very significant to us and always will be. We are thrilled to share emails and updates, with pictures, and stories, as well as letters that will keep you as involved in your child's life as you want to be. We are also open to making arrangements for visits when the time is right. We are excited to get to know you and work together to create a healthy relationship for everyone involved. We will always speak of you with love and will honor you with our words and actions. We know the decision you have to make is very difficult and we are very proud of how strong and brave you are and will always respect you for your choice.

Sincerely,

RJ & Jenny