Letter

Thank you for considering adoption. We know that considering the option of adoption is a courageous decision. We are excited to get to know you and would love to share our family with you.

We love children and we want to expand our family circle for a second time through adoption. We cherish our open adoption with our daughter's biological family. It has given us a greater extended family. We look forward to future open adoptions.

Doug enjoys singing, Calvin & Hobbes comics, dancing, peanut butter cookies, running, and being silly. Doug thinks fun is often the most effective teacher.

Marianne excels at photography, volleyball, bargain hunting, family history research, and training our dog, Lady. She enjoys baking cookies, gardening, and movie-watching.

Samantha is our oldest child. She loves playing with Lady, emptying the book shelf, reading books, taking walks in the stroller, playing at the park, picking flowers and humming. At home she enjoys dressing up her stuffed animals, dancing in the living room, and giving hugs. She loves other kids.

Doug is the kind of person that you always want to be around. He is kind, gentle, funny, and a big kid at heart. He makes friends easily and loves to make people laugh. He is an entertainer. He loves to sing, dance, perform, or be goofy. He has been in over 40 theater or musical productions. He is always willing to change a poopy diaper or hike in the mountains with a baby strapped in the Bjorn. His positive can do attitude is the thing I love most about him.

Marianne’s life revolves around being a mom. Before Samantha, Marianne was always the problem-solving superstar at work. Now she is the superhero at home, providing nutritious meal and snacks, ensuring cute and clean clothes, getting out for active time at the playground or at the rec center, inventing creative projects to stimulate the mind and the senses while beautifying our lives, or just having some fun unstructured playtime. During naptime she might be sleuthing into some family history research or crafting a new home design project.

As a family we enjoy being outdoors. We take road trips, we hike in the mountains, and we camp in our tent. Right now we tailor our family activities to Samantha's level which includes: Finger Painting with Pudding, Playing on Swings, Geo-caching at a nearby park and sorting rocks.

In our family, we have a set of core values that we live by, which include education, travel, traditions, honesty, music, gardening, and being active. We also value open adoption.

We view our open adoption relationship as an extension of our family. We want the children that come into our home to know their adoption story and to feel proud of it. We want them to be able to ask questions and find answers from their birth families. We want them to be able to know that they were loved even before they were born and that their birth families love them still. We've learned from other couples, that as the child grows, there will be questions that the child has about their identity or background and we hope the birth family would be willing to answer those questions. We believe it helps with the child's identity development.

You can read more about our family values and find out more about our hobbies and interests at our website at www.marianneanddoug.com. Or just email us. We love getting email.

We will teach our children that they were “hand-picked” by their birth parents to be in our home. We hope to encourage our children to strive to be positive role models who encourage, uplift and support those around them.

Kind regards,
Doug, Marianne and Samantha