Chris & Kevin
Chris & Kevin
Our days, to us, are perfectly imperfect. We’d love to tell you that our days are always full of wonder, joy, and adventure. However, chaos can ensue with the occasional toddler temper tantrum. We wouldn’t change it for the world!
We have learned to consider each day a lesson and to reflect on the good times, even though it can occasionally feel a little crazy. For example, we love to cook and particularly love to watch Isla, our daughter, getting involved with cooking.
It gives us immense joy to watch Isla curiously add cake ingredients to the big bowl, mix the batter and then sneak a taste of the gooey chocolate. Only then in a blink of an eye, chocolate cake is up the walls, the ceiling, the floor, we have a sugar-fueled, hyped-up two-year-old thinking we took away the batter!
Meanwhile, her dads are desperately trying to bring it back to fun and adventure! After lessons are learned, tears are dried, and every square inch of the kitchen is cleaned; we as a family enjoy our delicious, well-deserved cake and reflect on our perfect day.
Our Story
We met in 2009 through friends and married when it became legal in December of 2015 and shared many of the same interests. We started planning our goals to start a family in 2014, which became a reality in 2018 when our beautiful daughter came into our home. Travel has been a big part of our lives with family across the USA, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. We want to offer our children the opportunity to travel. Travel to see family, explore the beauty of the world, photography and most of all, being adventurous with food. Although we love an adventure and to travel, there really is no place like home and we take great pride in the house we have shared since 2013 and have enjoyed making it our own. We enjoy hosting family days to bring everyone together from all over the USA as often as possible. We love to see all the children of family and friends having fun in our backyard in the summer.
We both love animals and enjoy spending time with our cats at home. Animal welfare including their health is essential, hence both working for an animal health organization. We strongly believe that animals can teach responsibility, kindness, and compassion in people.
Our Relaxation & Fun
We love to spend time in the yard in the summer, grilling, fire pits, and playing games, watching our daughter explore the landscape (she loves her gardening kit and getting REALLY muddy!), and watching her play in the kiddy pool. We like to grab a beer and some food at our local breweries, especially those that accommodate children with great play areas. We get immense pleasure seeing our daughter explore and discover at the local zoo, nature center, Kalamazoo bird sanctuary, and local museum. We love movie nights and hunkering down with snacks and blankets. We also share a love for cooking and exposing our daughter to ethnically diverse foods. We travel to the United Kingdom at least once a year and across the Midwest to see extended family throughout the year. Due to our family being all over the world, travel is essential, and we like to make an annual trip. Chris likes to get out the sewing machine, but is not very skilled. Chris loves the architectural component to measuring, cutting and constructing clothes, blankets, pillows etc. Kevin is great with photography and digital art (he made our profile book), he has a very creative eye and loves to read murder mystery books
our adoption hopes
Gender: Any Gender, including an Ambiguous or Transitioning Gender Child
Ethnicities: Any Race and Ethnicity
Age: Newborn to 6 Months
Total of: 1 to 2 Children
a snapshot
of us
We Live In: Kalamazoo
Our Faith: Christian
Pets: Cat(s)
Kids Already: One Child Now
Child Care Plan: Licensed Child Care Home
Our Family & Friends
We have a diverse group of close family friends and are very sociable people who love to get together. We enjoy going out to community events or firing up the grill, laying out the yard games and hosting our friends and family to bring everyone together. Since Chris is from the United Kingdom, many of his childhood friends are there, but we make a frequent effort to video chat until we meet next. Maintaining contact with close friends and family is exceptionally important.
Our Home & Neighborhood
We live in a four-bedroom ranch style house situated on 2.5 acres in the countryside about 10 minutes from downtown Kalamazoo. We have lots of space inside and out and love to make use of our yard in the summer. We have a great community of neighbors and are 10 minutes from all amenities Kalamazoo has to offer. We love this house but don’t see it as our forever home, we plan to move in a few years to ensure we are in a great school district but we want to stay close to Kalamazoo and everything it offers.
Education
Education is important to us, and we believe it is the foundation to a person’s success. Understanding, recognizing, and harnessing individual strengths to encourage our child to be successful is important to us. With our daughter we have started engaging early in fun, creative activities to stimulate her senses and imagination and will be starting a Montessori daycare at 2.5 years old. We believe encouraging a love and respect for books as this is a principle foundation for developing creativity and knowledge.
Correction & Discipline
Chris values patience and understanding. Life can get messy but how we react in difficult times will dramatically alter our outcome and believes patience, perspective and understanding go a long way. Kevin values calm, proactive behaviors, thinking constructively about what to do next rather than dwelling on the problems at hand.
We do not believe in physical punishment techniques but rather strong, open, and effective communication. We take the love and logic approach and want to mentor, teach and engage their individual personality.
Our Faith Views
Kevin was raised Roman Catholic family and Chris was raised Church of England. We do not actively practice religion. We believe in a child understanding and respecting all faiths. Love, kindness, respect, honesty and communication are very important to us.
Chris's Career
I work at Zoetis, a veterinary medicine pharmaceutical company based in Kalamazoo, the headquarters of veterinary research and genetics. I am a senior research scientist focusing on treatments for diseases in dogs, cats, and horses. I love working for Zoetis, the company has provided me with excellent opportunities to develop my passion for science and contribute to the care and well-being of animals. Zoetis has a very strong flexible working culture to encourage a healthy work-life balance. After adopting our daughter, Zoetis was very supportive of our family and provided multiple adoption assistance programs including extra leave from work.
Zoetis provides twelve weeks adoption leave to each parent that can be used over six months. Our employer offers flexible working hours with opportunities to work from home if necessary. After placement, we both plan to take our combined 24 weeks over a 6 month period and then we will return to work. After 6 months we will consider daycare, nanny, working from home options.
Kevin's Career
I work at Zoetis, a veterinary medicine pharmaceutical company based in Kalamazoo, the headquarters of global manufacture and supply. I work as a master scheduler for livestock medications. I started out on the production floor as glass inspector at eighteen years-old and worked my way up through to my current role making use of the Zoetis tuition reimbursement program. I love to problem solve and my work challenges me daily to ensure the company can supply customers with much needed drug product for the well-being of animals and maintenance of the global food supply chain.
Zoetis provides twelve weeks adoption leave to each parent that can be used over six months. Our employer offers flexible working hours with opportunities to work from home if necessary. After placement, we both plan to take our combined 24 weeks over a 6 month period and then will return to work. After 6 months we will consider daycare, nanny, working from home options.
Chris
Chris is white Caucasian British (English, Welsh) born in West Sussex, England. We love to blend our cultures for example food, music, books, holiday traditions and our daughter gets to learn both British and American vocabulary.
Kevin
Kevin is white Caucasian American born in Wisconsin with French Canadian heritage. We do not take too many traditions from the French Canadian side but we do like to take annual vacations to Canada to visit family friends.
Thank you for taking the time to learn more about our family as you decide what is best for your child.
Our biggest dream has always been to become parents and grow our family through adoption. Please know that we would intend to raise a child in a warm and safe environment surrounded by family, including a beautiful sister that is excited to meet her new sibling.
If you decide to choose us, we will spend the rest of our lives making him, or her, feel loved and always honoring the choice you made. We believe that we can provide your child an abundance of love and opportunity, to guide, nurture and support them into being the strongest, kindest version of themselves.
- 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
Several keywords come to mind when we think through our adoption experience; organic, open, loving, honest, respectful, friendship, family, communication. We want the child to experience a united love from the birth family and adoptive family. We believe this will positively help shape their identity and well-being. We also hope that the adoption process is organic in nature. We would wish to explore and grow the connections that brought each family together and allow that to blossom into a lifelong friendship. We want to ensure we listen to, honor, and respect both family’s needs, so open and honest communication is welcomed.
Our family would leave the door wide open in the hopes of a new extension to our family, and a lifelong friendship. You are welcome to participate as much as you feel comfortable. We hope to have a relationship like our own siblings, step-siblings, parents, and stepparents. We would enjoy meeting as often as we can in person or via video chat. We would love to have days out, family days, and celebrate our child’s milestones together.
Our dream outcome is that the child only knows an environment of united happiness and love from the adoptive family and birth family. The child would have respect and understanding of the birth family’s choices and see that adoption is an act of pure, selfless love. Our hopes are that the child develops confidence, a positive self-image, and an understanding of who they are and where they came from. We would also encourage that the child has a unique and special connection with their birth parents and their adoptive parents. The families would hopefully grow to have a lifelong friendship connected by the love of a child.
OUR COMFORT LEVEL WITH DIFFERENT ADOPTION OPTIONS
- Very Comfortable
- Mostly Comfortable
- Unsure
- A Bit Uneasy
- Not Comfortable
Several keywords come to mind when we think through our adoption experience; organic, open, loving, honest, respectful, friendship, family, communication. We want the child to experience a united love from the birth family and adoptive family. We believe this will positively help shape their identity and well-being. We also hope that the adoption process is organic in nature. We would wish to explore and grow the connections that brought each family together and allow that to blossom into a lifelong friendship. We want to ensure we listen to, honor, and respect both family’s needs, so open and honest communication is welcomed.
Our family would leave the door wide open in the hopes of a new extension to our family, and a lifelong friendship. You are welcome to participate as much as you feel comfortable. We hope to have a relationship like our own siblings, step-siblings, parents, and stepparents. We would enjoy meeting as often as we can in person or via video chat. We would love to have days out, family days, and celebrate our child’s milestones together.
Our dream outcome is that the child only knows an environment of united happiness and love from the adoptive family and birth family. The child would have respect and understanding of the birth family’s choices and see that adoption is an act of pure, selfless love. Our hopes are that the child develops confidence, a positive self-image, and an understanding of who they are and where they came from. We would also encourage that the child has a unique and special connection with their birth parents and their adoptive parents. The families would hopefully grow to have a lifelong friendship connected by the love of a child.
Just one more thing...Several keywords come to mind when we think through our adoption experience; organic, open, loving, honest, respectful, friendship, family, communication. We want the child to experience a united love from the birth family and adoptive family. We believe this will positively help shape their identity and well-being. We also hope that the adoption process is organic in nature. We would wish to explore and grow the connections that brought each family together and allow that to blossom into a lifelong friendship. We want to ensure we listen to, honor, and respect both family’s needs, so open and honest communication is welcomed.
Our family would leave the door wide open in the hopes of a new extension to our family, and a lifelong friendship. You are welcome to participate as much as you feel comfortable. We hope to have a relationship like our own siblings, step-siblings, parents, and stepparents. We would enjoy meeting as often as we can in person or via video chat. We would love to have days out, family days, and celebrate our child’s milestones together.
Our dream outcome is that the child only knows an environment of united happiness and love from the adoptive family and birth family. The child would have respect and understanding of the birth family’s choices and see that adoption is an act of pure, selfless love. Our hopes are that the child develops confidence, a positive self-image, and an understanding of who they are and where they came from. We would also encourage that the child has a unique and special connection with their birth parents and their adoptive parents. The families would hopefully grow to have a lifelong friendship connected by the love of a child.