Justin loves to teach. He is often trying to teach our dogs or impart knowledge on our dogs. Justin has an adventurous spirit. He loves to go out into the world and see and experience new things and share those experiences with others.

Justin is also incredibly loving and caring. He takes caring for someone seriously and thinks about other's needs and feelings before his own. He is always thinking about how he can make my day better or what he can do to put a smile on my face. He is very in tune with the needs of his loved ones.

Leslie is amazing at coming up with a good time. She loves to plan fun trips and outings - things that she knows everyone will enjoy and actually get something meaningful out of. When we're on vacations, Leslie always plans fun, educational walks and loves to be the tour guide.

Leslie always puts others first and wants to be sure that everyone is happy and healthy. She always puts a lot of thought and emotion into thinking about how she can improve other people's experiences and lives and always thinks the best of everyone.

Our family has a cabin in the mountains not too far from us. We like to go there several times a year to go swimming in the lake, hiking, turn off media and enjoy reading and board games, star gazing, and campfires. There is a old gold mining town near there that has great activities for children.

We like to take day trips to find new places to explore. Where we live has lots of towns and places that would be great to share with a child, such as beach towns, Historic sites like Forts and Old West towns, and National Parks.

We like to do house projects such as remodeling and building furniture. We have a winter and summer vegetable garden. We think sharing these activities and skills would be valuable teaching tools to instill confidence and a sense of pride into a child.

We enjoy walking nightly with our dogs as well as going on hikes on the weekend. There are lots of things to learn about being in nature and a lot of our local parks have educational programs for children and adults.

Our town has events throughout the year that we try to always go to. Its a great way to build community, meet new people and have a fun day!

When we want to relax we like to have movie nights with popcorn and snacks. We also love to read and can't wait to be able to read with a child.

We want to be sensitive to the child's cultural background so that we can learn about and incorporate cultural practices and traditions. We feel that acceptance of people's diversity is very important. We want to create a space for them to learn about and appreciate where they came from. We enjoy traveling to other countries and learning about and experiencing their cultures. We feel that having that knowledge makes you a well-rounded person. We think it would be fun to take our child on trips to places where they can experience their culture firsthand. We would also like to incorporate those cultural traditions into their daily life.

We live in a small town that holds many family-friendly events year-round. These include a Christmas tree lighting with Santa, a Fourth of July parade, multiple festivals with kid carnivals, and summer Concerts in the Park. The park downtown also has a large playground and a splash pad fountain for kids to play in. We have highly rated schools and some are within walking distance from our house.

Our town started as an Old West mining town and still maintains some of it's old time charm such as it's architecture. You'll frequently see people riding their horses downtown and tying them up to a hitching post while they go to dinner.

Our home has four bedrooms. One of them has been turned into an office, and two others are perfect bedrooms for a baby, located right next to our room. Our favorite room is our breakfast nook area that has a bay window looking out onto our large backyard. The breakfast nook has a window seat that we enjoy sitting on to read. We have our family meals at the table next to the window seat. We also use this space for our Christmas tree because it's front and center.

We live at the end of cul-de-sac connecting to a green belt parkway. Many neighborhood children play on our court and on the greenbelt, often setting up baseball games. Our neighborhood also has its own playground, basketball hoops and community pool with a swim team.

Leslie was born and raised locally by her aunts. She sees them every Sunday for dinner. We often get together for dinners, barbecues, pool days, events around town and holidays. Leslie is also very close with her childhood best friend's family and sees them almost every week to hang out and watch movies.

For the Fourth of July weekend this year, Leslie's aunts and her best friend's family came over to our house, where we walked downtown to watch the parade, and then walked back to our house to go swimming in the community pool, barbecue, play cornhole, and roast s'mores over the fire pit.

Justin's family lives on the East Coast; his brother lives in Boston and his parents live in South Carolina. Justin's parents, brother, and sister in law visit here in California every other year for Thanksgiving. For the alternating years, we travel to Justin's parents' house in South Carolina for Christmas.

Some years, we like to take international trips together. Recently, we went with Leslie's aunts and Justin's parents on a trip to England, France and Belgium. Every fall, since both of our families have German roots, we like to go up to our cabin in the mountains with Leslie's aunts and have traditional German food.

Both our families are really excited to have a grandchild who can participate in all these activities with us. They're also extremely excited and happy for us, because they know this is something we've wanted for a long time.

Thank you for taking the time to read our letter. We are a married couple and we have been together 15 years and married 10 years.

We appreciate the weight of the decision you are making regarding adoption. We recognize that trust is earned and we are grateful for the opportunity you are giving us to show you who we are and what kind of parents we want to be.

We have always known we wanted to have children, but we haven't been able to have any through natural conception. For the past few years, it's felt like our lives have been paused, as we've waited and hoped to become parents. We often talk about plans we have for when we have children - things like trips we will take that are more child appropriate, or fun activities to plan like scavenger hunts on local hikes.

We often discuss how our daily activities would be enriched by having a child around. We love to travel and discover new places, cultures, foods and histories. Whenever we travel we often think about how cool it would be to share those new experiences with a child. We love teaching things that we already know as well as learning about new things and would love to share that with a child.

Our community pool has a very active swim team that has weekly swim practices and meets. We walk by the pool on our nightly walks with our dogs and see the children practicing. We would love to have our child involved in a sports activity where they can have goals and achievements as well as make lots of friends. Since the pool is less than a 5 minute walk from our house, this would be a great extracurricular activity. Justin was also a Boy Scout and since we enjoy the outdoors and camping so much we would love our child to be involved in the Scouts.

We hope that we can provide our child with the support and love that they need to pursue their passions in life and grow into a happy and healthy adult. As a couple, we support each other whenever the other one is having a rough day or going through a difficult situation. We want to bring that same support and nurturing to our child.

We never put too much thought into open versus closed adoption. As we started on our journey with American Adoptions we realized how beneficial having an open adoption can be. Leslie was raised by her two aunts. Her mother passed away when she was 1 year old and her father lost custody of her when she was 4 years old. During her teen years she struggled with feeling like she didn't know where she came from and also had feelings of loss because of not knowing her mother. We want to be open with our child about the fact that he or she is adopted, and we imagine that having contact with the birth parents will help to answer those questions about their identity.

We feel that it is important to have open and honest conversations about adoption with our child from the beginning. We plan to start these conversations early in a simple, matter-of-fact way that we can build upon later as he or she is better able to understand the concept of adoption. We feel that books made to explain this to young children are a good way to start. These books will be incorporated into our nightly reading routine in order to normalize adoption, so that our child never feels different or like there is something wrong because they were adopted. We plan to have regular communication with you via emails, phone calls and future visits and we hope that this honest approach to adoption will make communication and visits more comfortable and natural for everyone involved.

Thank you again for taking the time to read our letter and consider our Family Profile. We have so much love to share with a child and we appreciate you for considering us.

Sincerely,

Justin & Leslie