Sam and Jenny
Dear Expectant Parents,
We are Jenny and Sam. We are Southerners, born and raised. We moved to the Pacific Northwest three years ago and just love it. We love the quality of our life here. We have amazing friends and live in an established centrally
located neighborhood in a small Oregon city. We walk and ride our bikes to dinner, concerts, the park, and much more. It is nice that there is just a slower more intentional pace of life here. It is a really great fit for us. We are so
excited about becoming parents and raising a family here.
We must admit that there are a few things we miss about the South. We miss the cookin’, sweet iced tea, hot summer nights with the sounds of crickets filling the air while fire flies light up the yard and most of all, our family and friends. Our
families are an integral part of lives and they have been very supportive during our difficult journey that brought us to open adoption.
We met through mutual friends – actually a mutual family. Their grandfather, Papa Chick called everyone cousin, Cousin Jenny, Cousin Sam. He made you feel like you were part of the family. Jenny actually thought she was related to him the first 10 or so years of her life. We want our experience with our child’s birth family to be the same way. We want to create an atmosphere where everyone is welcome, accepted and feels like they belong.
We first fell in love with each other twelve years ago. We were ‘partying like it was 1999’ at a Millennium New Year’s Eve party and everything just clicked. Our first date was a week later and we have been together ever since. We married almost four years later in the fall of 2003. Our wedding celebration was on Jenny’s family farm with a weekend filled with family, friends, bluegrass and BBQ! It was great to spend the most wonderful weekend of our lives with everyone we loved in a place so special to us both. Jenny grew up spending time there and someday we hope to retire and build our dream home in the same field where we held our wedding festivities.
Our years together have been an adventure from the start. We have gone on many fabulous trips/vacations: Italy, Hawaii, a month long camping trip across the United States to name a few, but we have just as much fun at home. We love spending time with each other and our two dogs, Sophie and Dolly. Before we became pet owners we used to make fun of our friends who were crazy about their dogs and treated them like their children but then we became those people. We adore our cute fluffy little dogs who make us laugh each and every day. There is a lot of laughter in our house. A great deal of it comes at the expense of each other. We both like to pull (harmless) practical jokes on each other.
Our home is welcoming and cozy. It is filled with family heirlooms that are worth more in meaning than value. We have a great kitchen that is the heart of our home. We cook dinner together most nights and when friends/family visits we always end up congregating around the island. Our style is traditional, but not stuffy, it is comfortable and inviting. Responsibilities around the house are shared. Sam has a strange affinity for doing laundry and loading the dishwasher and he is very proud of his organized closet. Jenny often makes fun of him for it but is so thankful to have such a neat and tidy husband who is a great cook as well. Jenny has a knack for making everything look beautiful yet makes sure it reflects our history, heritage, interests and who we are today.
We both have successful careers. Sam is a Mechanical Engineer and works for a company that builds hydro electrical turbines. Jenny has a background in Interior Design. She works for an office furniture manufacturer as a Territory Manager covering Idaho, Montana and Oregon. We both are very driven and strive hard to succeed. Also it is very important to us to share the blessings we have been given with others. It is a focus of our lives to help those less fortunate by giving financially and of ourselves which we feel is equally as important.
Thank you for reading our letter and learning a bit about us. It is just the icing on the cake! There is so much more to who we are and what we have to offer (mostly good, of course!). We can not wait to add a child to our family. One of the main reasons we are drawn to open adoption is that it is child centered and focused on what best for the child. We look forward to sharing our lives with our child and our new extended family. We admire your courage as you explore the option of adoption; it is such a gift in so many ways. We thank you for taking the time to consider us.