We like to spend our leisure time either traveling, hiking, or going to museums – specifically natural history museums and science and industry museums. Most recently, we took a road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway in California stopping in several cities from San Diego to San Francisco with visits to the San Diego Zoo, two aquariums, and took a e-bike tour of Morro Bay. More recently, we also turned a work banquet trip to Dallas, Texas into a long weekend filled with multiple informative tours of Dallas, Arlington, and Fort Worth.

The most important thing to us is to spend quality time together. We've seen too many people who get wrapped up in their jobs and working to make a living rather than living their life. We believe that your career is what you do, but not who you are in the world. We like to spend our free time exploring as much as we can of our home state as well as traveling to see anything and everything the world has to offer. It is very important to us to make memories together as a family with as much of the free time that we have as possible.

We feel very fortunate to have been able to travel as much as we have and explore the world around us. We very much look forward to sharing those experiences one day with a little one of our own.

We currently have two dogs in our family that are truly members of our family. They have taught us so much not only about the unconditional love that you can have for another being and receive from another being, but also what it means to take care of someone who is relies solely on you for everything in their life while not always being able to say what it is that they need in the moment. It's also so interesting to see how they feed off your emotions and reactions to things. They seemingly understand when you are having a bad day and need some extra snuggle time or when you are happy and it's playtime. Besides all the love and affection that we receive from our pets, they are also a great way of learning responsibility which we believe is essential to learn while growing up from childhood to adulthood.

Both of us agree that our favorite childhood memories involve spending time with our families either camping or at family cabins.

Rebecca's family would go on two camping trips together every summer to various campgrounds in the Midwest. She has so many memories of playing together on the beaches, cooking food outdoors, sitting around a campfire, and boating on rivers and lakes.

Joe's grandparents had a family cabin just a few hours away from his hometown where he would often go with his grandparents and extended family to enjoy getting away from the city and being out in nature together as a family.

We believe that the memories we created during these times is what has given us such a love of traveling and being outdoors and we are excited to be able to form these same types of memories with a child!

We live in a very family friendly area of Arizona. We love our community and look forward to raising a family here!

Our house is a one-story, four-bedroom house with a finished, open backyard. Our favorite room is the spacious kitchen that has plenty of room for both of us to cook in at the same time, and our living room with our surround sound television/stereo set up for watching movies.

There are many children of all various ages in the neighborhood and there is a small park directly across the street from our corner house. On nice afternoons and evenings, there are almost always children outside riding bikes and playing with friends.

Our neighborhood holds several events in a big park every year ranging from Easter Egg Hunts, Pictures with Santa, Movie Nights outdoors on a big screen, and miscellaneous get togethers with food trucks, ice cream vendors, inflatable jumpers, and more family fun.

The majority of our extended family are spread out between Illinois, Wisconsin, and Florida. When we are visiting together, we all enjoy staying very busy, seeing all the sites of the city - even if it's someone's home town. Most recently, Becca's family visited us in Arizona, and we were able to squeeze in three or four tourist activities each day they were here. We are extremely grateful that our family members enjoy the same activities that we do - from traveling and sightseeing, to attending sporting events, to playing cards and games. This child would have many older cousins of varying ages in the family to grow up with and we cannot wait to add another child into all of the fun!

We are also very fortunate that our extended family members are super supportive and excited about our adoption plan. They are very much looking forward to welcoming your child into our family!

Thank you very much for considering our profile. You can't possibly understand how much it means to us that you are considering us for this amazing blessing. While we have only been married for a few years, we have been in a steady relationship together for over twenty years. We both come from families with multiple children and decent size extended families; however, we are not able to have our own children, so adoption is the blessing that will complete our family.

While we are sure that this decision is a very difficult one for you to make, we want to reassure you that you will get routine updates on your child through letters and pictures. We are also open to discussions about having an open relationship with you so that you can see how the blessing you may give us grows up.

We are very much looking forward to completing our family with a child. To watch them learn and grow in so many ways is a dream of ours. We would give them any opportunity they could possibly want in life - sports, dance, and education. We didn't always have the option for all those things growing up in our lives and feel that it is important that our child knows that anything they want to try, they can.

We simply cannot wait to share our love of traveling and adventuring with a child. We have dreams and ambitions to travel the entire United States and much of the world as a family. That is something that we were not able to do as children ourselves, and now that we are adults it is very much something that we want to share with our child(ren). Having had to wait so long to begin travelling and exploring, we didn't realize what all we were missing out on. We have made a point to start traveling more often by ourselves and every time we go somewhere new, we always note how we cannot wait to be able to do these things as a family.

We also want to convey how loved this child will be, not only by us but by our family and friends. We have possibly the most wonderful group of friends that have become family, all of whom are so excited to become aunts and uncles to our child. They have all shown us the joys of parenthood and are amazing examples for us to follow.

We understand that there will be hard times, as there is in much of life, but we feel that we are properly equipped to get through the bad along with all the good. We have worked really hard to lead honest lives and have open communication between not only ourselves, but all our loved ones. We also have worked hard to be able to have the best life possible for our family. When we are at work, we work hard to support our family. But when we are done with work, we are dedicated to family. We are extremely blessed to have flexibility with our jobs that guarantee the ability to be constantly present in our child's lives. We cannot wait to attend school functions and support them in not only their education but any and all extracurricular activities.

Sincerely,

Joe & Becca