Dear Friend,
We are very grateful to you for reading our profile. We are very eager to be parents and to share our love with a child; towards this goal, we have arranged our lives so that one of us can be a stay-at-home parent for our expected child. At the same time, you are considering what qualities are important to you and what family you would like to choose to adopt your child. Thanks for this chance to tell you a little bit more about us and our family.
My wife, Melanie and I met 11 years ago while she was in Georgia studying towards her doctorate in Education and I was managing a bookstore. We met through friends at a social gathering and have felt deeply connected since that time. We love each other now more than ever. We can’t have children ourselves and have known about our commitment to adoption from very early in our marriage. We long to provide a child with a loving, stable home. We are, thus, very excited about building a family through adoption.
We live in a very family-oriented neighborhood in a small town in Western Massachusetts. There’s a strong sense of community here – we look out after each other and come together for community events and good will efforts. There are excellent schools just walking distance away, beautiful parks to play in and neighbors who care to remember your name and what’s going on in your life. We feel confident that our child will have an excellent education and it is reassuring to know that our neighborhood is known to be a safe one. Every afternoon during the school year, you can watch the parade of parents with young children as well as older students walking home from school as they file past the house. Jason will be an at-home father, and can’t wait to be part of that parade!
Melanie is a college professor in education, where she teaches teachers how to help students who have difficulty learning to read become confident and successful readers. Jason is a writer and a consultant for bookstores, authors and publishers. Together we have been very lucky in that we have found careers that have allowed us to work in fields we care deeply about – reading and education. Also, our careers provide us with incredible flexibility, allowing Melanie to work from home more than half of the time, while permitting me to stay at home as a full-time dad.
With our backgrounds, it’s no surprise that we value providing our child with a good quality education. We want our children not only to have access to good schools, but also to have a wide range of experiences, educational and fun, to broaden their outlook, to excite their curiosity about the world and people around them, and to stimulate their imaginations. I’m particularly excited about my role as a stay at home dad, because I will have the opportunity to share some of my love of reading, sports, nature; art, and a million other things with our child on a daily basis. We are also thinking ahead in terms of advanced education, in that we have already begun planning a fund intended to support our child’s attendance in college or trade school, or to help them pursue whatever career path their future leads them down.
I grew up in Georgia, in a nice suburban part of Atlanta. Melanie was born and grew up in Massachusetts, in the same town (and house!) where we live now. We share a belief in the importance of being open-minded, loving and kind. We think about the needs of our community and we take into account the values of being kind to others and thoughtful about community in our day-to-day decision-making.
We will raise our child to have a confident sense of faith as well as to understand the importance of being active in our community. We are open to hearing about the values, traditions and perspectives you would like to make sure your child knows while growing up. We want to impart what you would impart, to be a part of passing on the values that are meaningful to you and your family as well as our own. We will encourage the child we raise to become the best person they can be, and to be a kind friend, a conscientious neighbor and someone who is responsive and helpful to those around him or her.
When it comes down to it, there’s nothing more important than family, and Melanie and I are both very close to our immediate and extended families. Melanie’s mother lives with us, and is very excited about being a grandmother. She will be happy to babysit on occasion, and we’ll be happy to have a night off for a date every once in a while! My family is still in Georgia, so I don’t get to see them as often as I would like, but we travel to see my parents a couple of times a year, and they come to see us at least once a year. I think they will visit a lot more often when their grandchild is here! My brother and his family also live in Georgia, near my parents, as do lots of other family members, so, when we go down there, it’s sometimes like a big family reunion. Melanie’s an only child, but she has lots of cousins and aunts and uncles in Western Mass as well, so there is always an abundance of family around.
Melanie and I love each other deeply, make each other laugh, and are looking forward to building our lives and family together. We enjoy taking day trips to museums and historical places, beaches and mountains, baseball games and vacations, where we learn a lot, laugh a lot, and build great memories. We can’t wait to share our lives with a child.
Thanks very much for taking this time to learn about who we are. Please let us know if you’d like to have a phone conversation. If you are interested in considering us, we would be happy to travel to where you are so that we can meet in person if that’s something you would like. We are open to staying in touch over the years ahead, if that is something that you might appreciate. We can imagine how much you and your family care. Your child will always know that we all worked together to give him or her a wonderful life, full of the love we all feel.
Please feel free to call Full Circle’s toll free number 1-800-452-3678 if you’d like more information about us or if you’d like to arrange to talk with us.
Our best wishes to you,