Bridget and Joe
Hello! We are Bridget, Joe, and our daughter Greta! We’re thrilled to share a small glimpse of our lives with you and humbly look forward to growing our family through open adoption. Thanks for taking the time to read our letter.
We met in 2010 while attending graduate school in Montana and after a year of dating, Bridget moved to Ethiopia to serve in the Peace Corps for two years. Throughout her time overseas, we kept in touch and rekindled our love when Joe visited near the end of her service. We migrated to West Virginia for a few years to start our careers and after learning that we were expecting our first child, we jettisoned back to the west and rooted ourselves in central Oregon. Greta was born in 2018 and we married in 2019. Throughout our relationship, the idea of adoption has always been present.
Bridget likes quiet mornings filled with coffee, dog walks and reading. She’s always planning great adventures, hosting friends and cooking up new recipes. Her career allows to her to manage and preserve the natural resources (plants, animals, cultural relics) of eastern Oregon. She is very social and enjoys hiking, biking, skiing, and camping with friends and family. She’s able to balance a demanding job and is a very present and creative mother. She’s strong, compassionate, genuine, and loves to share a smile or a laugh with family, friends, and strangers a like.
Joe has been working his dream job as map maker for the federal government. His work allows him to combine his passions of art and science into maps that help people navigate some of the most important places in the US. Outside of work, he loves to hike, bike, ski and camp. His goal each day is to make Bridget and Greta laugh, although a majority of his dad jokes lead to eye rolls. He loves to explore nature and takes pride in his amateur foraging skills, most notably by collecting morel and chanterelle mushrooms. As parents, we love sharing our love of the natural world with our four-year-old daughter.
Greta is beginning her first year at a local Waldorf kindergarten. She has a vivid imagination and loves to play with a number of friends in the neighborhood. Greta is very tuned into her surroundings and has an openness to try new things. She learned to ski at the age of two and is fearless on snow. Greta loves camping because it involves getting dirty, eating snacks, staying up past dark and star gazing. She loves to snuggle with her dogs, Ayuba and Sula, and looks forward to being a big sister.
Our family is strengthened by the network of friends and family that enrich our lives in big and small ways, and we see open adoption as part of this journey. We are choosing to expand our family through adoption, even though we can have our own biological children, because we feel that our family has a lot of love to share. We have a strong foundation and see open adoption as a preferred choice to expand our network of family and love. Our hope is that as we make memories together with our child’s birth family our bond will strengthen, providing a network of familial love and support for the child. We would love to have regular visits throughout the year that might include celebrating birthdays together camping, and lakeside picnics.
We value open adoption because it fosters honesty and authenticity to ensure our child has a strong sense of self. Whether or not we are part of your journey we appreciate that you have taken the time to read about us. Sincerely, Bridget, Joe and Greta