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Erica and Vaughn
Dear Birthparents
We admire your courageous decision to share your baby with someone you do not yet know. We cannot imagine how tough this decision must be for you. During this time, we would like to provide you with an honest look into our lives.
Our History: We grew up in the southern tip of South Africa. We met at college and instantly connected and fell in love. We are people-oriented. We are focused to help, support and treat everyone with respect and dignity and celebrate diversity. These mutual values are what sparked our initial attraction. During the following years our relationship grew and now we’ve been married for fifteen amazing and adventurous years. We’ve developed a deep love, loyalty and respect for each other and have a very strong relationship. While living in South Africa we both worked for extended periods doing training and recruitment (Erica) and helping growers develop alternative solutions to protect their crops (Vaughn).
During 2003 our lives took an adventurous turn, Vaughn got a visiting research position in the US while still working in South Africa. We immediately fell in love with everything the USA has to offer and represents. During this time Vaughn got an opportunity to work in the USA. Oregon has been our home for over six years. We live in a beautiful neighborhood in a city not too far from Portland.
What Vaughn says about Erica: Her loving, warm and sparkling personality is magnetic. She always has time to connect with friends and loves to entertain at home and prepares tasty and exotic meals that we have discovered during our travels over the past years. She is a nurturing, caring and patient person who has lots of energy and is a can-do practical person who can fix things in and around our house such as paint jobs. She loves to exercise in her free time. I believe that these attributes will make her a great mother, in fact, many people tell me they think she would be a great mom.
What Erica says about Vaughn: Vaughn is a very warm-hearted people person. He makes time for all people and has an adventurous and fun spirit who sees the humor in things. He is very energetic and enjoys playing games with his nephews. What I love about Vaughn is that he is a dependable and optimistic person who always sees the good in people.*What we do: We both value education. Vaughn works as a professor and his goals are educating farmers and students to implement pest management. Erica is a human resource specialist who worked for a large retail clothing company. Her focus areas are recruitment, training and development of staff members and managers. She did career guidance and counseling and loved it to develop the potential in people. Erica plans on staying home full time with our children.
Our home is a special place with enough room for a family. We live in a lively neighborhood close to large parks where it is easy to walk and bike.
We find joy in simple activities. We love spending time with our family and friends in our home. We frequently take our labradoodle Yogi for walks and enjoy going to coffee shops, bookstores and movies. Yogi reminds us of a cuddly bear and we could not resist giving him his name. In some ways we are also both bookworms. Sometimes we will spend a lot of time reading and cannot wait to share our new discoveries with each other. During winter we realized, Oregon is the perfect place to read. When at home, Erica loves cooking and helping Vaughn with landscaping and other new projects. We both have an active lifestyle and savor spending time outdoors, including biking, hiking, skiing and camping.
We enjoy traveling; we have visited multiple countries in the last few years for pleasure, work and family visits. We love spending time with our extended families and visit them often. We get together for holidays and vacations. Our parents live in South Africa. Vaughn’s parents live in a picturesque town, Montagu approximately two hours north of Cape Town and Erica’s mom lives in the wine lands close to the college town where we both studied. Vaughn’s two sisters and their husbands both live in South Africa, between them, they have two daughters and a son. Erica’s brother and his wife have two sons and they live in Brisbane Australia. We love spending time with our nephews and nieces and we stay in touch by phone calls, Skype, e-mails and texting.
Our values. We believe that we should treat each other and all people with respect and dignity and accept and celebrate differences in people. These values and our daily actions are shaped by our Christian faith.
Why we want to adopt: Our longing to have children has always been there, we want to open our hearts and our home to a baby as part of our family. We always wanted to have children but could not find a medical explanation why we could not have biological children.
We believe that we will be able to provide, nurture and love a new member/s in our family. We ideally would like to have an open adoption with regular contact, but respect your desire regarding this aspect of a future relationship.
We both have a deep desire to nurture and take care of a growing family. We were fortunate to both have wonderful parents who raised us. It is time to share these gifts by expanding our family. We hope that as we share our love with them, that our children will become productive, thoughtful, creative, caring and fun loving adults.
Our prayers and thoughts are with you as you consider your options.
Erica and Vaughn
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