Waiting Parents: Amanda and Kenneth
Howdy!
We want to begin by thanking you for this opportunity to introduce ourselves to you. We also want to let you know that we cannot begin to imagine what you are going through right now. The road that brought us each here is long and one that is not easily travelled yet here we are, together. We are immensely grateful for your courage and understand that your tremendous sacrifice is what can allow us to finally find our missing piece and expand our family.
We are Amanda and Kenneth, a teacher and engineer from Houston, Texas. Amanda is a certified reading specialist and Kenneth is a licensed Professional Engineer. We live in a wonderful gated golf community (even though neither of us golf!) with our two sweet retrievers Macy and Lily and our adopted daughter, Emily. All three keep us very busy! We both come from families with long standing Aggie traditions and still love to go to a football game or two every season! Traveling and being outside doing things, whatever those things may be, are our passions and we are fortunate to have many opportunities to enjoy them. As we have just celebrated our seventh year of marriage and are reaching more and more of our goals we have set, we are becoming increasingly excited about building our family and providing the opportunity for Emily to grow up with a sibling.
Family is extremely important to both of us and we are excited about passing on the love to future generations! Growing up, Amanda wanted nothing more than to be a mother and watch her children grow and learn and become their own independent people. Kenneth has grown up wanting the same thing and we both believe in our hearts that God meant us to be parents. When we were told by a doctor that a biological family was not a possibility we knew adoption was going to be our plan. In 2017 we were beyond blessed to have that dream fulfilled. Our hearts are open and ready once again to love and nurture a child, regardless of whether or not we gave birth to them and we feel blessed to have this calling!
We first met about eleven years ago through Kenneth’s brother Michael. Amanda was in a small Christian sorority and had a fantastic small group leader named Jenn. Jenn was dating Michael and brought Amanda on a trip to Houston to visit Michael where she met Kenneth. It was not until two years later when Kenneth was a sophomore at A&M that she finally admitted her crush on him and finally asked him to the sorority Halloween date party! After dating for two and a half years we got engaged and married fourteen months later. Now, seven years after our wedding we are still enjoying getting to know each other more and grow together in our relationship which is one built on trust and understanding.
Amanda has always loved children and has always held a job working with children, whether is was teaching swim lessons or being a camp counselor during the summers. A huge passion of hers has always been reading. She enjoys her job as a small group reading interventionist and dyslexia teacher. The opportunity to help students enjoy and be successful at something she has always loved is truly a dream come true. While excited about being a mother, she does plan to continue to work as a reading teacher during the school year and enjoying the wonderful schedule of having holiday breaks and summers off with the kids! Kenneth has always had a passion for tinkering with and fixing anything he can find. That is what makes engineering such a great fit as he gets to solve everyday issues that enable society to flourish. As he always puts it, if you drove to work today and flushed the toilet than all of his efforts worked.
Both of our families are very close and spend quite a bit of time together. Kenneth’s parents live just a few minutes down the road and we are half way in between both sets of grandparents so we try to get together as often as we can. The Cargill side of the family does love to have big reunions, usually one in the summer and then again around Christmas. Kenneth’s brother Michael, our sister-in-law Jenn, and our niece and nephew Kaylee and Charlie live in Frisco so we don’t get to see them as much as we would like but we do get together at the lake often. Amanda’s parents live in Dallas, but her brother Scott is an engineer for Shell in Houston. For the past few years we have made the drive up to New Mexico to visit Amanda’s grandparents, uncle and aunt and cousins in Albuquerque, New Mexico for Christmas. We are usually on the go, driving somewhere to go visit someone in the family but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Our time with our family is precious and we value them and the time we spend together very much. Everyone is very excited about the addition to our little family and we anticipate many more get-togethers in the future!
What we can offer is peace and comfort that your child will be very well-cared for and loved. We will do any and everything in our power to ensure that they develop and grow in to a successful person and go on to great things! As a teacher and an engineer, education will be a top priority yet we will learn their limits and not push them past what they are capable of. Our families are extremely close, even with each other, and are extremely excited about getting to love a new family member! Both of us grew up with family surrounding us and are very grateful for it, we will ensure your baby will be surrounded by family just as we were growing up.
We hope this helped you learn a little bit more about who we are, if you have any other questions or want to know anything else please don’t hesitate to ask! Thank you for taking this time to get to know us. We hope to get the opportunity to talk with you more!