Tucker and Angela

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From Us to You

Dear Expectant Mother,

It feels like we’ve been waiting our entire lives to welcome a child into our home, and almost daily we find ourselves imagining how wonderfully our lives will change when that moment comes. As part of our family your child will be loved unconditionally and surrounded by a big extended family who cannot wait to shower them with hugs and kisses and attention.  As a family we will have opportunities to travel and live all around the world. They will spend tons of time outside with us on adventures to the mountains, the beach, and beyond. We will emphasize education from a very early age and provide opportunities for your child to explore creative and athletic activities throughout their childhood. We promise to support your child’s every dream and do all we can to make those dreams come true. And above all else, we promise you that we will provide your child with a solid family foundation built on love, security, and a happy home so that your child will always know that they are loved.

We also believe in openness and so from the day your child is born, they will know their beautiful story.  They will know of the great love that you have for them and the difficult decision you made in love to place them for adoption.  It is our hope that you will continue to be a part of our lives as much as you feel comfortable.   As your child grows, we are happy to share their special moments with you, from holidays to birthdays, major moments in school, and all kinds of firsts. Whatever your comfort level of involvement is, we will still share with your child about you, often, and always with the utmost love, respect, and admiration for the incredible gift you’ve given us, allowing us to become a family.

While our story is different from yours, we too have faced our own deeply personal struggles over the years, and we can empathize with the many tough choices you are faced with at this moment. We want to offer our support to you in whatever way possible. More than words can say, we appreciate your consideration as you consider the right family for your little one. We remain eternally grateful for your consideration. May you find strength and peace in your decision.

With love,
Angela & Tucker

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Why We are Choosing to Adopt

Right after our wedding in 2016 we began our hopeful journey of building our family and dreamed of seeing little children running around the house within a matter of a few short years. Unfortunately, infertility had other plans for us, and despite years of aggressive medical treatments and surgeries, we’ve  been unsuccessful in having a baby.

However, our dream of having a family has never faded, and we are still hopeful that we can fulfill our vision of becoming parents through adoption. After much careful thought and prayer, we are at peace that adoption is the path we were always meant to take.

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About Angela, by Tucker

Angela has the kindest heart of any person I have ever met. She has an uncanny ability to see what people need most and be able to help them. Her intelligence and her genuine ability to care for people are what make her a great nurse anesthetist, a great partner, and those characteristics will translate into her being a great parent. She is adventurous, bold and imaginative. I can imagine her sitting with a baby and teaching them to read or sing or paint and it makes me so happy. What makes me most excited about Angela being a mother is that she will be able to pass on her empathetic views and desire to learn and I know that she will be the most amazing mother to your child.

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About Tucker, by Angela

Tucker really is my best friend. He radiates positivity, warmth, and light, and it makes people want to be around him all the time. He is comforting in times of stress, he’s the comedic relief in a tense situation, and he’s the voice of reason when things feel overwhelming. He has been my partner through the highest highs and the lowest lows, always by my side, always supporting our family. When I picture him as a father, it makes my heart feel whole. It is the role he was meant to fill. Watching Tucker teach a child to ride a horse, rock our baby to sleep with a lullaby, or finally tell the world all his “dad jokes” is going to be a dream come true. In my heart, I know that being a parent alongside him will be the greatest joy I’ve ever known.

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Our Relationship With You

The relationship that we envision with you is entirely dependent on what your level of comfort is. During your pregnancy, we are there for you 100%. We will be available via text or phone call 24/7, so reach out whenever you want, but we will do our best to respect your space, if you’d prefer. If you would like us to be at doctor’s appointments, we are happy to travel as often as we can to support you. When you are in labor, we’d love to be there for the birth of the baby, but we respect that your comfort and privacy take priority, and we understand that your feelings on this may change in the moment. After the baby is born, the level of communication between us is always flexible, depending on what you want, but know that we’re happy to maintain an open relationship. This could include sending photo and video updates by text, letting you know when major milestones are reached, or even arranging a meet-up every few years if you’re located out of state. We want to emphasize that there is also no pressure on you to have continued interactions after the baby is born. We have the utmost respect for the choice you’ve made to place your baby in our home and want to assure you that we’ll continue to respect your choices post-placement, whatever they may be.

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Lifestyle

Currently, we both work full time, with Angela working as a nurse anesthetist at a local hospital 4 days a week, and Tucker working as the Superintendent of an infantry-like unit at the Air Force base in town. Generally, we have weekends off together and use that time to either catch up on chores and yardwork around the house, plan a quick weekend getaway, or use those glorious two days to just rest and recharge. If we’re planning for a relaxing weekend off, we’ll make sure to get in lots of outside time, either walking the dogs around the neighborhood, taking our paddleboards out on the lake, or getting in a quick bike ride together.

At least once every few months, we have visitors come to stay with us for a weekend, either family members or friends from other states. We love hosting out-of-town guests, taking them out to dinner at one of the local restaurants and capping off the night with dessert on the screened-in back patio! When we’re able to bring a baby home, we know that our routine will certainly change, but for the better.

Angela will likely take on part-time hours at work to spend more time with your baby, and we anticipate our families coming to visit a lot more. As your baby grows up and enters childhood, they may attend preschool initially to facilitate socialization and age-appropriate play, with at least one parent being home with our child almost at all times, we hope to take lots more daytrips and expose our child to our favorite adventure spots, create playdates with our neighbors and local friends who also have young children, share and create family traditions, and teach them all of life’s little lessons.

During the regular day to day, we’re both introverts and are happy to stay at home watching movies, lounging with our dogs, or hanging out by the bonfire with our neighbors. But… we also LOVE to travel. Over the last three years, we’ve traveled to England, Ireland, and Scotland, taken a tour of three national parks between Arizona and Utah, hiked portions of the Appalachian trail through Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina, cross-country skied across Vermont, climbed the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and adventured around Atlanta, Boston, and New York. And because we’re located just a short drive to the ocean, during the summer months you can find us weekending on the beaches of Santa Rosa Beach or Amelia Island. Our favorite activities while we are on vacation are trying out new restaurants and wineries, catching a local baseball game, visiting local historical sites, and taking in the natural beauty of the outdoors. As we welcome a baby into our family, we are so excited to share this love for travel and exploring new places with a child.

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Our Hobbies

Tucker loves to sketch comics, practice lasso roping and train for triathlons. Angela loves to bake, shop for new clothes at local boutiques, and play tennis. But together, we have developed some newer hobbies as well!

In early spring, you can find us out in the garden getting our vegetables and fruit trees ready for the growing season. Gardening has quickly become our most productive hobby for sure and last year we were able to supply all our own produce from the garden! Before the weather gets too hot, we’ll also frequently hike together, sometimes even with the dogs, and camp out overnight on the mountain. Our favorite hiking spot locally is the southernmost end of the Appalachian trail.

On rainy days at home, we’ll both be curled up on our favorite chairs with a book, doing puzzles at the dining room table or having a Marvel Universe or Harry Potter movie marathon. Tucker also loves to strum on his guitar in his spare time, and Angela plays piano/keyboard. We would love to pass on this love of playing music with our future children!

Year round, we love to work out together. Whether it’s hopping on the Peloton bike or lifting weights in the garage gym we created last year, we’re always cheering each other on during workouts. Another one of our favorite activities is to ride horses. Riding is one hobby we’ve both enjoyed since childhood (Angela took lessons as both a child and an adult, and Tucker grew up in the rodeo circuit), and one that we’ve been able to continue enjoying recently since Tucker’s parents own three horses. It’s our hope that someday we’ll be able to have a ranch with horses of our own that our children will be able to grow up around.

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Our Dogs, Molly and Riley

We have two dogs that are the light of our lives! Molly is our happy 10-year-old Golden Retriever and the sweetest cuddler in the world. You can usually find her running around the back yard with a tennis ball trying to play fetch with anyone who will throw the ball for her! She has a ton of energy outside, but when playtime is over, she’s our angelic little snuggle bug and is always trying to get close to us. Riley is the newest addition to our family and is a 1-year-old Australian Shepherd. He is adventurous, wildly energetic, and loves going for hikes with Tucker. He chases Molly around outside, but also loves to follow squirrels, lizards, and birds too! Riley also has spent a great deal of time growing up around our close friends’ children and is both remarkably gentle and still mischievous when he’s playing with a young child! Both Molly and Riley love carrots and green beans, love to go for walks and will do almost anything for a treat. We can’t wait to introduce them to a new baby, knowing that they’ll be both incredibly protective of a child and incredibly patient as we adjust to life as a family of 5.

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Our Home and Neighborhood

“Home” has always been where we are our happiest selves, no matter the geographical location. Currently, we are stationed in a rural community just outside of a bigger city in southern Georgia, close to the Air Force Base. In the immediate surrounding area outside our subdivision, there is a daycare center, a private high school, a surgery center/urgent care, multiple pecan groves and a quaint downtown Main Street lined with small shops and restaurants. Our neighborhood is set far back from any main roads and is surrounded by tall Georgia Pines, with a community pool and park which are accessible to all residents. We chose this specific neighborhood because we loved the energy we felt every time we came to visit. We loved pulling up and seeing children playing in the park, families going for walks together in the evenings, community events like July 4^th Fireworks and neighborhood block parties all throughout the summer.

Our house is located on a fenced-in corner lot that backs up to a wooded area with many hiking trails. While we may not be in this specific location forever, we’ve done our best to make it “ours” by adding in vegetable and fruit gardens, a firepit, a hammock hung between two huge oak trees, and a screened in porch which is our favorite place to watch summer storms roll in. Within the walls of our home, we’ve tried to create a calming, cozy, yet modern aesthetic. Our house has a 2.5 car garage, 4 bedrooms and 3 full baths.

We envision using one of the front bedrooms as our future child’s room, picked specifically because it has plenty of room, a large closet for storage and best of all, it is the sunniest spot in the whole house! While we’re currently using another room as a home office/library, we picture this space eventually becoming a “playroom” for our future children.

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Racial & Cultural Diversity

Understanding a child’s cultural identity is something that we’ve considered very frequently during our adoption journey. We appreciate that within the United States, there are thousands of different racial and ethnic backgrounds from which a child might come. Over the last few years, we’ve explored those varied backgrounds through the books that we read, the music we listen to, the food we eat, the places we visit, and the people we surround ourselves with. If your child is from a different ethnic/cultural background than us, we plan to weave elements of your ethnicity and culture into their everyday lives, beginning at an early age. We will continue to educate ourselves on the social and political issues that face our Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities, and hope to provide a safe space for our future child to discuss their feelings about being a transracial adoptee. In our current location, we’re surrounded by so many different racial and religious groups that we know our child will have role models in the community with whom they can explore their cultural identity in greater depth. We’ve discussed this plan with our families, who themselves are made up of all colors, religions, and beliefs, and we’ll receive continued support from them once a child is in our home.

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Our Families & Friends

Despite being geographically distanced from our families, we’re both extremely close to our families, and everyone can’t wait to meet the newest family member!

Angela – My whole family lives in Massachusetts for the time being, with my father, sister and brother all living just outside of Boston, while my mom lives in a rural section of central Massachusetts. Both my parents still work full-time but are planning to retire in the next few years. I speak to my family by either telephone or text every single day, and I know that if I ever needed them, they’d hop on a plane and fly to us without a question. I also have a very large extended family on both sides, with lots of cousins my age. It’s always so busy when we go home to visit them because we try to squeeze in visits with everyone! My mom’s side of the family is Italian, so picture big Italian dinners, everyone talking over each other when we get together, and tons of hugging. My dad’s family is Irish and are very proud of their heritage as well, having big extended family reunions every few years, playing Irish music at get-togethers and proudly flying the Irish flag on the front porch. All my cousins have started raising their families, so it’ll be so exciting for us to bring a baby home when we visit and continue the close-knit family traditions with the next generation.

Tucker – My family is spread out over the western US, with my parents and sister living in Texas, but extended family living everywhere from Alaska to Oklahoma to New Mexico. My parents are retired, with my mother and father both retiring from the local Sheriff’s office a few years ago. Now they spend most of their time tending to their 40-acre property in West Texas and keeping their horses happy and healthy. My family is religious and attends church services once or twice a week. My niece and nephew followed in the family tradition of military service and are stationed in Japan and California, respectively. My parents are so excited for us to bring a baby home that they have mentioned coming out to stay for an extended time when we finally are able to raise our family.

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Family Traditions

When we started to think about what our family traditions were, it turns out that almost all of them revolve around food! The first tradition we could think of was originally from one of our earliest dates. On our first Valentine’s Day together, Tucker made spaghetti and meatballs, and now 10 years running, we have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner on Valentine’s Day!

The second tradition is that every single time we go to New England to visit family, no matter where we stay, we make sure to visit Kimball Farm, which has the most incredible ice cream in the world and has been a tradition every summer in Angela’s family since childhood.

A lot of our newer family traditions come around Christmas time, and include opening family presents together on Christmas eve before going to Midnight Mass at church, making a big brunch for Christmas morning, and driving to see a Christmas lights show at least once in the holiday season. When we lived in Washington, DC, we would go to see the lights at the National Zoo, but since we live in Georgia now, we drive a short distance to North Florida and see the interactive light show at the Suwannee River Music Festival site.

Our Religious Beliefs

Angela grew up in the Catholic faith and still attends services once a year, typically on a holiday when visiting family back home. Tucker grew up attending services through Church of Christ, and while he doesn’t attend anymore, he does still maintain those Christian values. Religion has not held a very influential place in our adult lives, so we are non-practicing. However, we are both still faithful people, and believe a “higher power” is looking out for us and helping to guide our decisions daily. When we have children, we plan to raise them in the religions that we both grew up in, as this is something that is important to our parents, and we also plan to leave the door open for our child to explore other Christian denominations as they grow up and form their own opinions.

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Our Promise to You

Our promise to you is that we will remain eternally grateful and in awe of the gift you’ve given us. We promise to teach your child about you from an early age, emphasizing your bravery and strength, and promise to incorporate aspects of your heritage and culture into their everyday life.

We promise to the best parents we can be, raising our child with empathy and kindness, teaching them first to be a good person, and giving them as many opportunities to succeed as we can. And lastly, we want you to know that we will love this child unconditionally every day for our whole lives.