Alex & Tyler
Alex & Tyler
If rain on your wedding day means good luck, we may be the luckiest couple in history! When we planned our late-June wedding day we did all of the planning ourselves; we had cute centerpieces, we had plans for how to decorate, we prepared delicious food and ordered decadent cupcakes–the whole nine yards. Little did we know that nearly none of our planning would matter.
We stood in the living room of Tyler’s parents house watching the beautiful creek-side backyard where we were supposed to get married go underwater after a week-long rain storm. We marveled as the “rain resistant, outdoor, all-season tents” that we had purchased crumpled under torrential rain, and yet, in spite of it all, we got married in an intimate, tear-filled, indoor wedding in a living room. It was magical!
Many of the loved ones we talked to that day said “you’ve got quite a great wedding story to tell,” and they were right. Anybody who knows us knows that we love stories, and a good story undoubtedly has unexpected turns to keep things interesting. We could never have expected our wedding day story, and at the same time, the marriage that that rainy day started has been full of blessings and love since day one.
We cannot wait to turn the next page in our story as we start a family. We realize that, just like with our wedding day, we cannot plan for everything that comes next, but we know that challenges bring us closer as a couple, and that, without a doubt, we are each other’s best friends. Come rain or shine, sleepless nights or not, we are ready to weather the weather together.
Our Story
We are Alex (shorter and blonder) and Tyler (the smiling, tall one)! We met through OkCupid with a 97% match in 2017! While Tyler thought he wanted someone tall, dark, and handsome, it only took one date for Alex to win Tyler over, and we have been thick as thieves ever since! We bonded over our love of games, books, the outdoors, and food. We got married in June of 2021.
We are people driven by our values and passions to make the world a better place, utilize our talents in the world, and have fun along the way! This has mainly been as leaders, role models, and educators in our communities. We are supportive of each other’s pursuits, enjoy our time together, and balance each other out. Tyler takes on a lot of the day to day things while Alex takes on a lot of projects, research, and long term planning.
We love each other and have a lot of joy in our lives! We have some great social circles and tight family bonds. We are looking forward to having a little one join our family since we hope to have 2-3 kids that can all grow up together with their cousins, who live nearby.
Our Relaxation & Fun
We alternate between being home bodies and adventure seekers. Every year we take family vacations to Montana and to Lake Michigan at family houses or cottages. We value the time to see family while enjoying the lakes, mountains, and beauty of nature. We both really enjoy traveling! Tyler in particular loves going to New York City to catch musicals, shows, and hit up his favorite singalong showtunes bar.
Alex loves to travel outside the country and has gone to nine other countries so far. Our last major trip abroad was to Spain to visit Alex’s sister, who was living there at the time. We also try to go camping several times each summer. While at home we play a lot of board games, enjoy science fiction/fantasy shows, and love to get our hands on a good book. We also passionately love a really good meal, be it made at home or found at a good restaurant.
our adoption hopes
Gender: A Boy
Ethnicities: Any Race and Ethnicity
Age: Newborn to 12 Months
Total of: 1 to 3 Children or 2 Siblings
a snapshot
of us
We Live In: Kalamazoo
Our Faith: Christian
Pets: No Pets
Kids Already: No Children Now
Child Care Plan: Licensed Child Care Center Licensed Child Care Home
Our Family & Friends
Our families are important to us! We frequently see Tyler’s parents, two brothers, sisters-in-law, and our niece and nephew in the Grand Rapids area for the holidays, school events, celebrations, and just because. Alex’s family comes out to Michigan every fall to visit, and we travel out to Montana every year for a beautiful winter wonderland during Christmas or summer time at the lake.
Alex has an older brother and younger sister. We keep in touch through FaceTime and phone calls year round when we can’t see each other in person. Alex met his biological mother, Jill, as an adult and has been building his relationship with biological family over the last few years. We have broad friendship groups from work, school, and around Kalamazoo.
We do a lot of seasonal activities, camping, game nights/weekends, holiday parties, birthday celebrations, and food-focused social gatherings. We enjoy hosting people at our home for these events and hosting friends during the holidays.
Our summers are quickly filled up with traveling, adventures with friends, and other social gatherings. We love the hustle and bustle of all the wonderful events and people we are blessed to be involved with both nearby and around the world!
Our Home & Neighborhood
Nestled in the woods across a creek, our beautiful home sits on a half acre. While we are in town near parks, schools, and shopping, we feel like we live peacefully just outside of town with the wildlife and woods. We love being able to spend time in our relaxing backyard.
With 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, a three season porch, and a full finished basement our home provides plenty of room to expand and raise a family.
One of the great pieces of living in Kalamazoo is The Kalamazoo Promise – a guarantee of free college education to all children who attend K through 12th grade in Kalamazoo Public Schools! The cost of college will never get in the way of our kids getting a college education, if that is the route they pursue.
Education
Learning is so important to us, though not only in the traditional senses. As people who have worked in education for much of our professional lives, we know that people all learn differently, and we look forward to supporting our children from day one as we will work to foster a love of learning in our children. We hope that this will lead them to be fully equipped to follow their dreams and passions as they grow up.
We are both avid readers and game players who love to expand on the things we know about, and we hope to always be learning more and learning to think flexibly, no matter how old we get. We hope that our children will also follow this lifelong learning mindset, learning through both family activities like games and conversations and through their own exploration and self-motivated learning as they grow and develop their interests.
Both of us have found education to be meaningful for us, personally and professionally, as it helps us to think more deeply about the world and how we can best use our skills to interact with our local communities to make positive changes. We know that by learning about the world our children will also learn about themselves, and we look forward to supporting that self-discovery as they become the wonderful people that they are meant to be.
We are grateful to live in the Kalamazoo community, where our children, if they choose to pursue a college education, will be supported by The Kalamazoo Promise scholarship program that would provide full tuition support.
Correction & Discipline
Children need structure and boundaries; we believe that they thrive when given clear expectations and corresponding consequences, positive or negative, for their choices. We know how important it is for us as parents to communicate effectively with each other so that there are clear expectations from us, and we believe that when a choice warrants it, discipline is a necessary piece of a child’s upbringing, helping to guide and show them how some actions have bad consequences. This is a way to help them understand how the world works and how they can be more compassionate, caring, and conscious people to those around them.
We believe in balancing a child’s discovery of things and allowing them to make their own mistakes while still guiding them with rules and choices so that they are gradually learning about how to exist in a family, in school, and eventually in the world. Expectations and consequences need to be constantly adjusted and reevaluated as children get older, otherwise they are not continuing to grow and mature appropriately.
Our Faith Views
We are open and loving people who were raised to love others, just like God first loved us. We strive to model our lives in a way that reflects the perfect love of God into this world that so sorely needs love. We are guided by our faith commitments to work for the betterment of our communities and world, whether on a small scale by caring for those in our inner circles or on a large scale by caring for our environment.
We were both raised in Christian homes (Tyler in the Christian Reformed Church and Alex in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) by families where faith was a foundational part of life, and we are both still practicing Christians today. We hope to raise our children to know the love of God and to treat all people with grace and love.
Alex's Career
For nearly a decade I worked with students living in on-campus housing. I was drawn to the work because I wanted to improve the quality of peoples lives. A lot of my work was developing student leaders, building environments that supported learning, addressing student behavioral concerns, and supporting students with mental health struggles.
My passion for social justice has led me to spend a lot of time teaching students on issues of power, privilege, and oppression. I have won awards for my work, including one for training students on structural racism and privilege.
To stay local, I shifted my work in 2021 to running an apartment complex and was quickly promoted to an Area Property Manager, supporting other property managers as well as running my own. I still serve a community and help people to live a better life, the people I work with are just more grown up and often have families of their own!
Because my job doesn’t start until later in the morning, mornings will be a special time for me and our child to spend together. I will do morning drop-off at daycare on my way to work around 9:00am. I also foresee staying up/getting up for more of the middle-of-the-night wake ups, since Tyler has a much earlier morning for work. I get home around dinner time each day, and those hours before bedtime will be full-family time.
Tyler's Career
I am in my 10th year of teaching (10th grade honors English, 11th-12th grade Creative Writing, and 11th grade International Baccalaureate/honors students). I am known for being an engaging, tough-grading, and highly-impactful teacher. I have received multiple recognitions and awards as a teacher and speech coach, and have led my speech team to win the state speech championship 2 years in a row; last year I was voted President-elect of Michigan Speech Coaches Incorporated.
My love of theatre continues to this day; I have directed nine stage productions between the high school and middle school in my school district. I also mentor my high school’s LGBT group, and I lead Montage, a literary magazine where students publish original work.
I love the opportunity to see learning in action–to bring excitement to learning, or stories, or communication, and to see my students grow. High school kids are hilarious and complex; they challenge me to stay sharp and push me to be my best. I truly love what I do as a teacher, director, and speech coach; seeing students reach their potential is truly remarkable, and I really feel called to the work that I do.
As a high school teacher, I am at work early in the morning, but I am also out of work early in the afternoon. I will be able to take responsibility for early morning care/wake-ups, since I am up by 5:15am most days anyway, and then Alex will take over care by 7:00am so that I can head to work on time. I am out of work at 2:40, so will be able to pick up our child from daycare by mid-afternoon and spend time together for a few hours before Alex gets home in the evening. Once Alex is home then we will spend evenings as a full family.
Alex
white Caucasian American born in Oregon with a mixture of Scandinavian, English, Welsh, and German background. My adoptive family is Norwegian. Growing up in Idaho and Montana, every year around Christmas and New Years we make Leftsa, a Norwegian potato flatbread that is fried on a griddle, covered in butter and sprinkled with sugar.
We gather as an extended family with and make it together with our grandparents. I make a rice pudding for the Christmas holiday meal. My family would gather again for New Years to celebrate together: my sister would bake a wide range of cupcakes, we would all go down to my grandparents at flathead lake, and just before midnight we would bundle up in coats to walk down the road to watch a firework show put on by a house on the mountainside above us.
Tyler
white/Caucasian American born in Michigan. My background is mostly Dutch, though I am not closely linked to my Dutch roots. My family loves to sing, and so whether it is singing our prayers before meals or sitting around the piano as my mom plays and we all choose a harmony, singing is a family custom even to this day.
As for yearly traditions, my family all takes a week off from work every summer and goes to a cottage on Lake Michigan (with no WiFi) where we swim, play games, cook, and just rest and relax as a family. We get together with my siblings and parents throughout the year, but always make sure to have a shared meal to celebrate birthdays.
Another family tradition happens in December, where we take a Saturday and get together to make coconut bon-bons and chocolate covered peanut butter balls to give out as holiday gifts (or just enjoy over the holidays!).
Thank you for taking some time to get to know us as you make this decision about what is best for your child. We are truly so humbled just to be a family you consider, and would love the opportunity to meet you so that we could learn more about each other.
We approach much of our lives with excitement, and this is no exception! We are excited to be starting a family through adoption; it has been something we both have wanted for a long time. Alex’s experience with his own adoption and the stories we have heard from both his birth mother and his adoptive parents have given us a fuller picture of the massive act of love, on both sides, that adoption is. We would love to navigate with you how to best support and love this child as we write a beautiful story together.
We look forward to loving and supporting a child through opportunities and intentionality, giving chances for adventures, learning, laughter, and growth toward being their best self. Our home is filled with stories, music, games, and most importantly, love, and we cannot wait to share that with a child.
We send our love and support to you as you make this decision, and hope that you are filled with peace and purpose in the midst of this process.
Blessings,
- Child Separation, Attachment, and Bonding
- Child Development, Including Safe Sleep Practices for Children
- Behavioral and Emotional Needs of Adoptive Children
- Impact of Adoption on the Family
We love the beautiful family structure that adoption allows for, and look forward to building our family with the child’s birth family involved, if that is something you want. While we would not force a relationship if you do not want to be involved in the child’s life; in our ideal circumstances we want our child to know of their birth parent(s) and to be able to have a relationship with you that is built on occasional planned visits or FaceTime calls.
We want to navigate as a team with you so that, first and foremost, the child’s needs are prioritized. We hope to be on friendly terms with you so that our child gets to know you as they grow up and can eventually take ownership for building their relationship with you later in life.
OUR COMFORT LEVEL WITH DIFFERENT ADOPTION OPTIONS
- Very Comfortable
- Mostly Comfortable
- Unsure
- A Bit Uneasy
- Not Comfortable
We love the beautiful family structure that adoption allows for, and look forward to building our family with the child’s birth family involved, if that is something you want. While we would not force a relationship if you do not want to be involved in the child’s life; in our ideal circumstances we want our child to know of their birth parent(s) and to be able to have a relationship with you that is built on occasional planned visits or FaceTime calls.
We want to navigate as a team with you so that, first and foremost, the child’s needs are prioritized. We hope to be on friendly terms with you so that our child gets to know you as they grow up and can eventually take ownership for building their relationship with you later in life.
Just one more thing...We love the beautiful family structure that adoption allows for, and look forward to building our family with the child’s birth family involved, if that is something you want. While we would not force a relationship if you do not want to be involved in the child’s life; in our ideal circumstances we want our child to know of their birth parent(s) and to be able to have a relationship with you that is built on occasional planned visits or FaceTime calls.
We want to navigate as a team with you so that, first and foremost, the child’s needs are prioritized. We hope to be on friendly terms with you so that our child gets to know you as they grow up and can eventually take ownership for building their relationship with you later in life.