New York Family Looking to Adopt a Baby: Chris, Sarah, Raya, & Alannah

Our paths first crossed in college. We were in college choir together and our love of music brought us together. We were married in 2004 and life has been a beautiful adventure ever since. We bought our first home shortly after we were married and settled into life in a rural community. Chris grew his marketing company and Sarah dove into her career as a school psychologist as we began life as a married couple. We enjoyed weekends spent with family and friends, traveling, hiking, biking, attending cultural events, and exploring our area. As a couple, we have grown together over the years while maintaining our individuality. One of our greatest assets as a couple is that we balance one another. We have different strengths, and they compliment one another well. We also communicate well and this has helped us to navigate life together.

The births of our daughters changed our lives completely and brought so much joy into our day-to-day lives. Sarah stayed home with the girls when they were young and returned to work after a few years. As parents, we work hard to nurture our children’s unique strengths. Our girls are so different from one another and it is so much fun watching their individual personalities shine in different ways! Our schedules allow us to spend a lot of quality time with our immediate and extended families.

We love to have adventures as a family. On any given weekend, we can be found biking a new trail, hiking in the Adirondacks, attending cultural events, eating at restaurants in our community, or paddle boarding on a nearby lake. On quieter weekends, we enjoy family movie nights, game nights, dinners/barbecues with nearby family, afternoons at the local pool, and playing with our dog, Arlo. We also really enjoy traveling as a family. It is very important to us that our children explore new places and broaden their sense of the world. It is our hope that our children have a childhood filled with diverse experience, both in their day-to-day lives and through travel. In 2014, we bought a vacation home in Florida. We love to spend time there as a family and have built many memories there.

In 2017, we purchased our current home in the Capital Region of New York. This has allowed Chris to grow his business even further, for us to be closer to family, and for our children to have more opportunities for cultural and learning experiences. We love our community and are finding that it is a great place to raise a family!

Trying to understand the complexities of race in America is very important to our family. Since our children were small, we have talked with them about race and current events. Our bookshelves are lined with books centered on the lives of characters of all backgrounds and written by diverse authors. Our personal experiences have helped us to recognize the ongoing work and exploration that are needed to parent a child of a different race. We are prepared to continue that work and are committed to making sure that, if we were to parent a child that is a different race than us, they would have role models that share their racial background and they would be part of a larger community that helps to nourish their racial identity.

For a few years, our family provided respite foster care. We found it incredibly rewarding to care for children that needed a safe home and a caring family. It was so wonderful to see our children welcome new little ones into our family and home. As we have closed that chapter, we have realized that while our hearts have always been drawn towards adoption, our experience as a foster family opened our hearts even more to the possibility of adding a child to our family through adoption. As we have a close friend and a family member that are adoptees, our support system is comfortable with adoption. We are all very excited to see where this part of our journey takes us!