To be a parent is to provide a unique kind of love. It’s a love that creates space to encourage and ensure a child can learn and grow as they individually need to. It’s providing support so they can explore the world, themselves, and learn how to thrive.

We both can’t wait to see our child explore passions and interests and see how they change over time. Lauren is particularly excited to see what their favorite songs will be, what songs they’ll hate that we love, what subjects excite or bore them. Tom loves movies and stories and is looking forward to finding out if they’ll love comedies or action movies, buttered popcorn or cheese! We enjoy inspiring exploration for our nieces, nephews and godchild, and can’t wait to do that as parents.

Building a lifelong love of learning is one of the MOST important things to us. At the end of the day, ensuring our child has the ability to imagine, to think for themselves, question what they see around them in a logical way, and have the means to explore their interests and talents is what matters. Education is what will ensure that – through exposure to the arts through museums, trying out musical instruments, looking for bugs and birds we’ve read about in books, building train sets and model airplanes - making learning tangible and fun.

Learning isn’t just about school, either – we’ll work to build values like finding positivity, resilience, patience, the ability to express and channel thoughts and feelings, compassion, empathy and care. We also intend to travel with our child to foster the idea of being a global citizen – and will work on a second language at home.

Lauren About Tom: Lauren loves how easily Tom makes friends, and has the ability to make anyone, and everyone, laugh. She respects how choiceful he has been in growing his career, choosing cultures that allow him to bring his authentic – loud, funny but focused - self to the workplace. She is grateful for how encouraging he has been in cheering her on in her own career, pushing her on when she doubted herself. She is also thankful that he learned a few decent pasta dishes. Her love language is making food for other people!

Tome About Lauren: Tom loves how thoughtful and caring Lauren is, and how she knows what to say to coax someone out of their shell. He also loves how passionate she is about her (many) hobbies, how persistent she was with learning how to golf, and admires her avid reading habit. He appreciates her guidance and perspective when it comes to decisions, difficult days at work, career choices, and making dinners taste better!

Our family and friends (chosen family!) are warm, generous, expressive and all show love to each other through food and storytelling, whether that's over a Sunday dinner, mid-week coffee, milestone celebration, or holiday. The biggest compliment is to trust someone else with your recipes – meaning you know they will do them justice!

When we are together there’s trips to specialty grocery stores to search out the hard-to-find things that make a dish just right, get that must-have treat to commemorate occasions, and to simply spend time together. Lauren treasures both her Christmas shopping trips with her father for seafood to make the Italian Seven Fishes Feast, their trips while she was a kid to the Asian grocer for steamed buns, and Tom’s grandmother showers us with love by making our favorite cookies, desserts, and breads. If you can’t cook you try to follow instructions in the kitchen as best you can!

The reward from that cooking is to sit down and recall stories about relatives and friends from the last time we gathered. Even a story told over and over again is still funny because of how differently people can remember it.

Our families and friends live both close to our town and in our hometowns; we visit together often and take advantage of video chats and messages. Our parents still love a good snail-mail card. We feel our family is unique in that we value our connection to bridge different interests, perspectives, and distance.

We have fond memories of exploring the outdoors as kids – camping, collecting lightning bugs, wading through streams, fishing and getting really, really dirty! We live in a community where our child can do the same and more! Our neighborhood is nestled in between state and regional parks, and a short drive to the beach. We can walk downtown, where there are children’s toy and book stores, a library, candy shop, pond, and an elementary school.

We love where we live because the strong cultural heritage – we have families young and old, those relocated and those raised here in our State, and ethnic backgrounds that make our arts, music, and cultural community one of the most vibrant in the country. There are Jazz, Arts, and Food festivals several times a year.

Our house is bright and cheerful with big, sunny windows that look out to the giant trees that surround us. Lauren likes to say it looks like we are looking at the scenes of a model train set when you look out at the twinkling lights in the wooded hills behind us at night. Our favorite rooms are the kitchen, where Tom likes to karaoke and dance while Lauren cooks, and the family room, where Lauren’s piano is. Both she and her mom learned to play on it, and while Tom’s talents clearly lie in comedy and athletic pursuits (he did manage to play “Chopsticks” once) – Lauren is hoping she might be able to teach our child to play someday.

It’s 9PM as we write this, the house is quiet despite our two large dogs wrestling with each other in the kitchen. Our house is usually a loud one; music plays while we clean, cook, unpack groceries. Happy noise from a home full of neighbors, friends, children of our friends, family, godchildren, and the dozen or so dogs that pay us a visit as pets of our guests and playmates for our dogs. Dancing in and out of the living room. A karaoke microphone that probably should be hidden. But at this time of night, the house feels large and it feels still.

It’s a house we saved for and bought in a vibrant neighborhood, walking distance to parks and the elementary school, big redwood trees shading trails and sports fields. We hoped that our neighbors would become our friends (they did), we’d fix the awful color the house was when we bought it (checked that box), we’d work on getting a garden going (on it’s way), and raise kids in this house that were as happy as we were as children.

At this time of night it’s quiet, though. That’s a reminder that while the kids aren’t here yet, we’re writing to you, and we hope that means that we’ll be building our family soon.

About us: we became friends at College 18 (!) years ago, taking too many years to realize we liked each other more than typical friends do, ha. We’re celebrating our 10-year wedding anniversary this year, and still think each other are as cool as ever. Our nieces and nephews seem to agree that we’re still cool, so that makes it official. We chased fulfilling careers (both in Finance, but doing very different things) and the travel bug over time to our current home, planning to start our family. As that proved not as easy as we had thought, our sadness in adversity was softened with the knowledge that years ago, before being married, we had decided that our lives together would include adoption.

It is our most sincere hope that adoption adventure includes you in it.

We have SO MUCH pent up love and energy and joy waiting for this child. We are excited to watch them learn, change their mind a million times, find their passions, find what lights a spark in their heart, and explore the world around them. When life throws its curveballs, we will fiercely advocate for them, support them through adversities, provide stability, steadfastness and lift them up when they need it most. We have a tribe of friends and family that are here for us and can’t WAIT to shower a child with their love, too. Our promise to you is that we will ensure you share your child's life and adventures throughout his or her life, should that be your desire. Our hope is that in time that relationship could grow. We have profound respect for you, your own life’s journey, and hope that our paths may lead us to each other.

With love, appreciation, and a great big hug (Tom’s are the best),

Tom & Lauren