Our love story started in 2018 over a stack of textbooks and notes. We met in medical school in a class of 32 students. We started off as friends and often studied with the same study group.

That blossomed into a relationship as we grew closer after months of quizzing each other, going on snack runs, and taking study breaks to walk Jacob’s dog George. For our first date, Jacob made a home cooked meal, and we played with George. Since then, Jacob continues to hone his culinary and grilling skills, and we often enjoy hosting dinners for our friends. We have been happily married since 2021 and have since gotten George a furry sibling named Gus.

We have enjoyed merging our childhood and family traditions over time. To celebrate Christmas, we will gather with family and all of our parents to decorate (and eat) cookies, watch Christmas movies, and sing Silent Night at the candlelight Christmas Eve service.

Every June, we travel to Florida with the family— something Jacob has been doing since childhood—where we spend a week swimming, sunbathing, and eating as much grouper as we can find.

For the Fourth of July, we love hosting or attending a cookout with friends and watching local fireworks. For Thanksgiving, we gather together for a home-cooked meal courtesy of Joyce’s uncle followed by chopping down and decorating a Christmas tree the next day with Jacob’s family.

We are so excited to share these experiences with our child and watch how our traditions expand over time.

There are many things that we love, admire, and respect about each other. Jacob is a very supportive and loyal partner. He is a natural care-taker and loves nothing more than to provide for his loved ones. Whether it is a home-cooked meal or a helping hand with a home project, Jacob is someone who can be counted on without hesitation. He is also incredibly resilient. From battling cancer at a young age to supporting family members through chronic disease and injuries, he has a wonderful depth of character and empathy which has made him an amazing partner and physician.

Joyce embodies kindness and warmth with all of her being. She cares deeply for her people and is always there to lend a shoulder for comfort or a listening ear. Even after some of her closest friends have moved away, they still call her regularly because they know she will truly listen and consistently support them through whatever struggle they might be facing. She loves deeply and without reservation. To know Joyce is to have a lifelong friend.

Our extended families are pretty different but have blended together wonderfully. Jacob's family is large and lively. His parents, two younger brothers and their spouses, and many cousins, aunts, and uncles all live in a small town in Indiana. This makes for large, loud, warm family dinners that are full of laughter. Many of the cousins and one of Jacob's brothers have young children which has only added to the fun of the get-togethers. Some of our favorite memories with Jacob's family are the annual trips to Florida where we soak in the sun, play lots of euchre, and eat a ton of grouper. Our niece who goes by Joey was the highlight of last year's trip-- she kept us busy taking make-believe breakfast orders, looking at cow pictures, and swimming in the pool.

Joyce's family is a little smaller and more spread out but no less close. Her parents live in Indiana, and her brother, sister-in-law, and brand new nephew live in Minnesota. We face-time weekly to catch up on the latest news and baby pictures. We love spending our Thanksgivings together with our out of town uncles and aunts where the highlight is Uncle Russell cooking up a storm with his professional culinary skills.

Our families are beyond excited for us to start our own family and we are confident that they will provide a loving and warm support network for our child as they have for us.

We live in a suburb in Southeast Michigan. We love walking the dogs around our neighborhood which is full of cute houses. We live about 1 mile away from the main downtown stretch of our suburb where all of our favorite local restaurants are located. There are many local events year-round including art and food festivals that we often take advantage of. Our favorite so far was the taco festival with exclusively local taco trucks. We also love to check out the winter lights at the nearby zoo and went to an outdoor concert with fireworks and cannons for the fourth of July. Our neighborhood is full of young families and their children so Halloween always brings lots of trick-or-treaters. We would have so much fun sharing these experiences with our child!

Our home is cozy and comfortable. We have three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a semi-finished basement we have turned into a small gym and sitting area, and a fenced-in backyard. We love to sit on the back porch in the summer to read and often host cookouts featuring Jacob's grilling. We have a small garden which produces raspberries and blackberries that Joyce turns into baked goods and jams. We also plant vegetables and flowers throughout the summer. Our two dogs love playing out in the backyard and we can envision our child playing with them and in the garden as well.

We are so happy that you have taken the time to get to know us. We are so excited to start our family, and we know we will be great parents. We are confident in our ability to provide for a child as a two-physician household (pediatrician and surgeon), and we hope that our love for helping others will make us great role models. We feel that we have a lot of love to share and would enjoy nothing more than to use our love to raise a child. We both grew up with families that provided supportive safety nets for us, and we want to provide that for our child as well.

We plan to share the story of adoption with our child from the beginning. We believe in honoring that story and believe that the loving presence of their birth parent will help them form a more well-rounded sense of self and identity. Joyce is an enthusiastic reader and scrap-booker and has already started collecting books about adoption and has begun working on a scrapbook to document and cherish the story of how our family was formed through adoption. One of Joyce’s fondest childhood memories was hearing stories of her father’s childhood at bedtime. This is a tradition we plan to continue with our own children but will expand to encompass our child’s unique story. We also hope to keep in contact with you, the birth parent, through bi-annual letters with photos as well as emails, texts, and phone calls if desired. We feel this open relationship will create a meaningful support system for everyone.

We both grew up in the kind of house where, when summertime rolled around, the shoes came off and we took off running barefoot. When we picture spending time as a family with a child, we picture the same sort of summer spent barefoot in the garden and trees, holidays surrounded by family and good food, and winters bundled up sipping hot cocoa and admiring Christmas lights. We love opening our home to friends and family to host dinner, tell stories, and play games, and we would love to welcome a child into our warm and celebratory household. Many of our friends and family already have young children who would love to have another playmate.

Our marriage is very strong, and we believe this will make a great foundation to raise children. We have been happily married for almost 5 years. We are both comfortable with having the difficult but necessary conversations in life as we do this daily as physicians. Although this can be hard, our ability to communicate in the face of uncomfortable conversations has brought us closer together. For instance, on road trips with the dogs, we will often take turns asking each other “pondering” questions - the kind that you come up with in the shower or topics that have been weighing on one’s mind. We enjoy continually learning more about one another, love each other more every day, and hope to have a similarly curious relationship with our child. Working in medicine has also made us incredibly grateful for and intentional with our free time since we know nothing is guaranteed. We try to stay present in the moment and never take our friends and families for granted. There is nothing that we love more than a late night bonfire with friends, family dinner and euchre tournaments, or evening walks around the neighborhood with the dogs. We cannot wait to share these simple joys with our child.

We are grateful that you are considering adoption for your child. We cannot imagine what emotions you may be feeling right now. We hope that the information we have provided gives you some peace and is helpful as you make your decision. If we are the right match for you, we hope you know that your child will be loved beyond measure. We picture a future filled with love and joy for our future child and hope you can share in our vision as well.

Jacob & Joyce