Adoption profile

This is our adoption profile, a slightly longer version of the one our agency has. It’s our ‘Dear Birthmother’ letter, though we hate that term. If you’re an expectant mom reading this, then you’re just that – a pregnant woman who’s thinking of making an adoption plan for her child. You’re not a birth mom until after you’ve given birth and placed your child with its adoptive parents.

Anyway, we hope this tells you a little more about us. If there’s anything else you’d like to know, we’d love to hear from you.

Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to find out more about us. We’re Karl and Linda, and we’ve been together since 1995. Neither of us were looking for a serious relationship, but we met during the first week of the school year, and have been inseparable ever since.

We’re English, but we’ve been living in America since the beginning of 2005. We’ve made plenty of great friends here, and we often get to visit our families and friends back in the UK. It does mean though, that any child we adopt will gain UK citizenship, as well as keeping their US citizenship.

Our home now is in Southern California, which we’re loving, especially the weather. Our town’s center is within walking distance, and there are 24 parks and a children’s museum in town, plus the San Gabriel Mountains & the ocean pretty close by. Our house has a lovely, sunny bedroom that will be the baby’s room eventually! We’re also close to several highly-rated public and private schools, so we’ll have lots of choice there. Since we’re both scientists, education is important to us. Any child of ours will be encouraged to never stop asking questions. We hope they’ll decide to go to college, but there’s no pressure if it’s not for them. They’ll have the opportunity to go to university in the UK though, if they fancy the adventure.

As much as we love being in California, we also love traveling. Karl’s job gives us plenty of chances to travel and explore, and for Linda to take more photos (she’s also a photographer). One of our favorite places is Hawai’i, and we travel back there as often as we can. We adore the weather, the people and the beaches, but we both study volcanoes, so we have even more reason to love it. (The dormant and gentle ones, that is – no dangerous lava fountains for us!)

One very important part of our lives is our love of animals. We don’t currently have any pets, since we’ve travelled too much in the past and it wouldn’t have been fair on them. We have both previously had dogs though. Karl’s parents had a golden retriever when he was a baby that had a litter of puppies; she took Karl under her wing as just another of the pups, keeping him out of trouble & stopping him climbing the shelves. Karl then grew up with one of the pups as his dog. Linda had a fantastic Jack Russell, and is willing to accept that Karl’s dog was probably the second best dog ever.

Due to our love of animals, we’re both vegan, and have been for over 35 years between us. In fact, Karl was raised as a vegetarian, so he’s never eaten meat. Like many vegans, we’ve read extensively on nutrition, and now especially on children’s nutrition, so we’re confident that we’ll be giving our child the healthiest diet possible. There’ll be lots of locally grown, fresh fruit and vegetables, and we’ll make sure to watch for the possible pit-falls, like making sure they get their vitamin B12. There’ll be plenty of treats too though, and we’re both pretty fine cooks, and cook dishes of several nationalities.

Linda comes from a family with several adopted cousins & second cousins, and always wanted to give birth to one or two children, and adopt one or two, so adoption was something we discussed early on in our relationship. Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to have biological children, so we’re now ready to start building our family through adoption only. Our families are excited about this, and can’t wait to meet the new addition. Linda’s adopted relatives now have children, and even grandchildren, of their own, so our child will have no shortage of relatives who understand what adoption is like.

Karl on Linda:

Linda with her dad and nephew

Linda stood out from the crowd when I first met her during the first week of my masters course. Attractive, compassionate, fun and with a sense of adventure; we clicked immediately. It was only after chatting for a while that we also discovered we had a lot in common, from music and art to politics and food, and she surprised me early on in being one of only a few people outside my immediate family to consider that I could maybe go even further morally.  It didn’t take us long to become the world to each other, with her my best friend and lover rolled into one. She makes me laugh and think, and we are both comfortable either in complete silence or chatting away like maniacs for hours. We also enjoy a friendly argument, and although we tend to agree with each other about most things, we have gotten to the stage of buying smartphones just so we can look up which (if either) of us is right when we’re out and about (Linda will say that it is her). [Linda's note: It's always me.]

It doesn’t show much now, as she lost the accent before I met her, but Linda comes from a very provincial part of the UK – meat & potatoes country – with few people leaving, fewer going to university, and many living only slightly above the poverty line. So her decision as a teenager to go vegetarian was an extremely unusual thing in her hometown, and certainly was not an easy one. However, she weathered the disapproval of many in her typical style, which is something I admire her greatly for: if something is “right” she just does it, with dogged determination.

Linda’s decision to go back to college to study Physics, after years of being a photographer, was one borne out of, not only a love for science, but also a feeling that she never lived up to her full academic potential as a child. To give you some idea, in the UK, national league tables of government-funded schools are published once a year, and a few years after we met, to our astonishment, it turned out that Linda’s school was at the very bottom of that league, and mine was at the top, out of a list of thousands. But, to her credit, the grade she achieved in her undergraduate degree was the same as mine, and she continues to be active academically, a perpetual student, pursuing a part-time doctorate in Environmental Science. However, Linda never completely abandoned her photography, and still produces some excellent quality photos. She has a great eye for composition, combining technical and artistic aspects really well.

Linda teaching her cousin's kids how to draw on her laptop

Over the years I have watched Linda with the children of friends, and have always been impressed at how natural she is with them. She has an enviable ability to be responsible and caring, and yet playful and child-like at the same time, drawing children in to games and teaching them at the same time. Compassionate and practical, she remains completely calm and approachable at all times, and all children we know seem to warm to her completely, and tend to want to please and impress her.

Despite being very independent and capable of having a good career, Linda intends to be a stay-at-home Mum, with the intent of completing her Ph.D. and continuing her photography at a much slower pace during this time. We both feel that a close relationship between parent and child is important, and fortunately my job puts us in a secure enough situation to make this possible. I have no doubt that she will be simply amazing as a mother.

Linda on Karl:

Karl and his parents

Karl’s been my best friend since we first met. We immediately clicked over our love of music, but the more we talked, the more we realized we had in common. Like me, he has strong convictions, and two of the first things I noticed about him were his willingness to discuss these with an open mind, and his innate confidence. I also love his sense of humor – he can be silly, or sarcastic (it’s a British thing), or just plain clever, but he always manages to make me laugh.

He’s also one of the most compassionate people I know; he’s got a very strong moral compass and sense of fairness, and it’ll be lovely seeing him pass those on to our child. No matter what I’ve tried to achieve during our time together, Karl has supported and believed in me 100%.

Since childhood, Karl’s had a strong interest in the sciences, and in particular astronomy. Despite being discouraged by his high school careers advisor, who thought no one really ended up working as an astronomer, he followed his dream, and now works for NASA. The only part of this he doesn’t like is that he doesn’t get to teach students the way he would have done working in a university, but he makes up for this by working with students over the Summer and doing outreach work – giving public lectures and the like. Like many scientists, he’s kept his childlike sense of wonder at the universe, and never stops asking questions. Once a child reaches the ‘why?’ stage, they’ll find a willing audience in Karl, ready to answer each and every question they have. He’s also going to be great at helping with homework.

Karl’s very musical too. He’s been in several groups, singing (incessantly) and playing guitar, performing everything from folk to metal. Having grown up singing songs with his mother from a very early age, he’ll enjoy the chance to do the same with his own child.

Karl on the beach in Hawaii

We both love reading, and Karl’s love developed when he discovered his mother’s collection of fantasy novels. He quickly worked his way through those, then moved on to the science fiction at his local library. He’s certainly going to make sure his child has plenty of books to hand and will be an eager reader of them at bed time; I can see one of our few arguments over our child will be who gets to read the Harry Potter books with them.

Something else we have in common is a love of games – card games, puzzles, board games and being a bit more active with our Nintendo Wii. Karl learnt numeracy at a young age by insisting on being the banker in Monopoly, and got literacy lessons from playing Scrabble, and will patiently teach those skills to his child. I’m sure he’s also looking forward to the day his kid is old enough to play tennis with him too, since I’m useless at it.

We’re hoping for an open adoption, preferably with some visits with our baby’s birth family. We both feel it’s important for a child to know everyone who’s important in their lives. If we’re matched with an expectant mother who isn’t comfortable with that much ongoing contact, or who maybe doesn’t want face-to-face meetings for the first few years, we’ll understand, but we’d prefer not to have a fully closed adoption for the child’s sake. In any situation though, our child will know from the earliest age how they came to be in our family, and hopefully we’ll at least be able to show them pictures of their birth family and let them know how much they are loved.

Thank you again for taking the time to learn more about us like this. We hope you’ve liked what you’ve read so far, and if you’d like to learn more, we’d love to hear from you. Our email address is karlinda@live.com, or you can contact our adoption agency, Heartsent Adoptions, on 1-888-339-8802 or by emailing heartsent@earthlink.net.

Best wishes,

Karl & Linda