Karen andScott
Hi there and thanks for reading our letter!
We are Karen and Scott, and we live with our two cats in a suburb of a large metro area in the Pacific Northwest. We met 5 years ago through Match.com (yes, really!) and were married on a golf course 3 years ago, with Scott wearing a kilt of his family tartan. Scott’s family is Scottish and he’d always wanted to have a full dress outfit celebrating his heritage. Part of Karen’s family is Mexican, so attending a wedding that included kilts and a bagpiper was a new event for them, but they loved it. We are both proud of our varied heritage and look forward to sharing it with a child. We are also excited to include that child’s heritage in our lives.
Scott grew up in a small rural town in Southwestern Washington and Karen grew up in Southern California. Karen’s mom moved to the Northwest while Karen was in college at the University of California. After visits with her mom, Karen realized she wanted to move to the area. Scott attended the University of Washington, and in the end both of us graduated from the UW. We both enjoy cheering on the UW Huskies, Seahawks, Chargers, Sounders and Red Wings.
We also enjoy cooking, household DIY, sports and the arts. You can often find us working on house projects, trying a new recipe, or attending a sporting event, music concert or opera. Our annual trips for our anniversary
in September have taken us to the Gorge, Eastern Washington and the Oregon Coast (where we got engaged and celebrated our honeymoon). We enjoy being outdoors, skiing and exploring our local area. Family trips can take us to Minnesota, Oregon, California, Nevada and Arizona. Someday we hope to share and introduce all of these things to a child.
We are lucky to have our siblings and at least one of each of our parents nearby. Even with some of our family
in other states, we get to see most of them by traveling or hosting holidays at our house. In the past two years we have hosted Christmas for both families. This past spring we traveled to Arizona (where Scott’s mom spends her winters) and met up with his sister and her family. We spent a week enjoying the pool and sunshine and meeting Scott’s mom’s Arizona friends. Karen’s great aunt Lou lives in the area as well, and she was able to attend a large barbecue we helped host while visiting. Family is important to us, and spending time with them is a priority. It is this strong connection to family that makes open adoption so appealing for us. We look forward to bringing a child into our family, but we also want that child to have a full understanding of and relationship with their birth family. We hope to include the birth family in birthday celebrations for the child, as well as other holidays our families celebrate, like Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Karen works as a purchasing manager in the IT department of a law firm and Scott is a graphic designer for a large insurance company. We both have good jobs and full lives, but we’ve always wanted children. We tried to have children as soon as we got married, and suffered many miscarriages in the process. After surviving those losses and unsuccessful fertility treatments, we decided that rather than continuing the treatments, adoption was a better choice for us. Finding open adoption has solidified our decision even more since it is so honest. We don’t like secrets and we are excited to have found a process that puts the child first and pulls the shroud of secrecy off adoption.
We hope this short letter gives you a sense of who we are. Thank you again for reading our story and we wish you all the good things and small blessings in life!