We are Cori and John and are so excited to take this opportunity to tell you more about ourselves. We’d like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to read our narrative! We both work in higher education at The George Washington University (John) and the University of Maryland (Cori) so we enjoy learning and working with people from all different backgrounds. We love to travel and celebrate our anniversary each year with a big trip. We also love the outdoors and anything that involves water, like scuba diving, kayaking, swimming, and boating. We hope to encourage our child to join us in these passions while they also find their own. We both are very curious and love to learn, so we cannot wait to see where our child’s passion lies and help them to develop it.

Cori is very outgoing and a caring advocate which suits her well as she serves non-traditional college students including undocumented students, housing insecure students, student veterans, and students aging out of foster care. John is equally outgoing and caring as a passionate supporter of the arts, he can often be found building something for a stage or teaching others how to build something for their home.

We understand the challenges we are facing by choosing to grow our family through adoption from foster care, but we are excited to bring safety, stability, joy, and love to a child who joins our family. We are fortunate to have extended family that also grew their family through foster care to adopt. Our nephew joined our family through adoption in August 2017 and our hearts exploded. Cori’s family has decades of experience working in special education. Her sister-in-law offered to assist with IEP conversations and ensuring all of our child’s needs are met. We also have close friends who chose to grow their families through adoption, providing us with referrals for trauma-informed physicians, dentists, and therapists. We spoke about becoming parents early on in our relationship. We both knew that we wanted to grow our family, but Cori always dreamt of adoption as the means to have a family. When John met Cori’s nephew, he understood her bond with him and fully supported her desire to add to their own family through adoption.

Our community is small, diverse, and family-friendly, with many other families and children of all ages nearby. We live in Silver Spring, Maryland. We have a lovely two-story home with a big backyard – perfect for kids to play in with a babbling creek running along the perimeter! We are so excited to welcome a child into our family, which also includes our dog, Lucy, and two cats, Ricki and Benny. All three are very friendly and love people, especially kids!

Thank you for your compassion, advocacy, and dedication to our future child. We appreciate the care they receive and we look forward to working with you to help them transition into our family.