Tom & Vikki In Washington

We met when we were still just teenagers in a small little mountain town in California - and small town living and love of nature are in our bones. We fell in love pretty quickly over our mutual love for life and ability to laugh despite hard times. We both experienced pretty traumatic events in our early life that shaped how we lived. Vikki was in a car accident and Tom underwent chemotherapy. It's a pretty hard thing to keep us down and we choose to meet all that life deals us with our faith, sense of humor and with lots of love and support from family and friends.

The first five years of our married life we devoted to building a home for our future family while also enjoying traveling around the country, from Hawaii to Alaska. During these years Vikki was a teacher and earned her masters while Tom worked for Boeing designing future airplanes. After a few tough years of planning for our adoption and surviving a few major life events, including a housefire, at last, in 2017, all our dreams came true when we adopted our beautiful daughter, Lydia.

Lydia is nothing short of amazing. When she joined our family, our life was great, but she just made it pure magic. She was an answered prayer and dream come true and we are still just pinching ourselves at how much fun raising her has been. She is funny and smart and loves learning. She has an absolute heart of gold and is so considerate of those around her. Lydia has asked for a baby brother or sister to play with for a long time and we are so excited to see her as a big sister one day. She talks daily about all the things she wants to share with her sibling including one day having bunk beds together. She will be the best big sister and will show our next child so much love and devotion. Lydia loves to do arts and crafts and walk around our lakes and can't wait to have a sibling to share all this with.

We are incredibly fortunate to live where we do. We are surrounded by amazing schools, zoos, parks and beaches and we take full advantage of them all! When we are home, we spend a lot of time outside in our beautiful backyard or exploring the two lakes and parks we have in our community. Lydia loves going on nature walks and we do as many of them as we possibly can. In our neck of the woods, you take advantage of the weather on a sunny day and our favorite thing to do is pack up the car and hit the open road. In our opinion, not much can top playing in the dirt and sand and taking in all the beauty around us. Sundays are important family days that always include church and oftentimes, a stop at the park.

There is no shortage of love in our family and as our families continues to grow the cousin shenanigans only multiply. We have an incredible family and when we brought Lydia home all the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were so excited. We had both grandparents fly into town that very first month Lydia was born.

Our parents love visiting and joining us on all our outings to the parks, zoos, beaches and mountains and we love flying down to visit them too. All our immediate family live just a few minutes apart, so when we visit we go from house to house playing with cousins all day and having slumber parties at Lydia’s grandparent’s houses each night. All our family is so very excited to see where this next adoption journey leads us and to see our family grow once more.

Christmas is really big in our house! Vikki likes to say she converts the house into the North Pole each year and decorations go up early, like almost after Halloween. Having a child to explore all this magic with has only made the holidays extra special!

Traveling is really important to us. Our joint love of history and the outdoors has taken us to some pretty neat places including Washington D.C., Civil War battle sites and a handful of national parks. We just love adventuring across this beautiful country of ours and it has been so much fun taking Lydia along with us and showing her some of our favorite vacation spots. As a family, we love to see new things and we can't wait to grow our family again and add to all the fun.

We always wanted to adopt in order to grow our family. When we couldn’t have babies of our own, naturally, it was so effortless to pour all our attention into adoption because we always wanted to adopt and have our own biological kids. We adopted our first daughter in 2017 and she is a perfect miracle and our biggest dream come true. We are so excited to add to our family again through the miracle of adoption.