Welcome! We are Lara & Sean

We first met 12 years ago while living in Ecuador to study Spanish and Biology. While we became friends in Ecuador, we actually fell in love 3 years later in New York City. Believe it or not, two random kids from the Midwest, who met in Ecuador, were lucky enough to randomly run into each other on the street in a city of 7 million people.

Three years ago we got married and have been building our life together here in our favorite city, Chicago. When not at work with our patients or students, we love to bike the city, adventure to new restaurants looking for international food we've never tried, get outside as much as possible, and spend quality time with our friends and family.

Now as we move into the next chapter of our life we hope to grow our family through adoption. As both of us have spent much of our lives working in education and healthcare with children in many different parts of the country and world, we have always thought that adoption would be the best way to grow our family. We believe that adoption supports our beliefs in sharing love and support with any child we'd be lucky enough to welcome into our family.

Sean:

I grew up in a small town in Michigan, where my family and I spent most of our time outdoors hiking, biking, sailing, canoeing, and playing sports.  These activities are still very important to me and I try to get outside or play sports every day.

For the past 10 years, I have been a teacher and coach in New York City and South Chicago, working hard to ensure that every kid gets a high quality science education.  While every day brings challenges, I love teaching and pushing my students to enjoy science and achieve as much as they can in their education.

Lara:

I was born in Dallas-Texas, grew up in Minnesota, went to college in Wisconsin/Ecuador and became an adult in NYC and Chicago. I have been lucky enough to have had many homes, families, and communities over my lifetime. I believe that my experiences in each of these places filled my life with many diverse situations and different kinds of people allowing me to development my core passions for travel, community, human and gender equality, and equal education for all children. 

I currently work as a genetic counselor at UIC, helping patients who have cancer in their family understand their risks and get extra checkups. In my free time I love to run, hike, bike, travel with my sisters and Sean, and read anything I can get my hands on.

Our Families:

The people most excited for our adoption, besides us, are our families who can't wait to welcome another member. We are both part of large, loving, and loud extended families that get together often and would do anything for each other.

Lara’s family bonds through travel. When we were little, all 6 of us would climb into our family mini-van for 3 week cross-country road trips.  When not traveling together, we all love spending quality time at our family lake cabin in Indiana.

Sean’s brothers and dad enjoy spending their time together outside doing all sorts of activities. These outdoor adventures are lots of fun and bring us all closer together.  Sean’s mom passed away several years ago and we try to live our lives in a manner that reflects her kind, joyous, and adventurous spirit to ensure she lives on through our lives and actions.

What we hope to share with our Children:

We have chosen Chicago to build our family as we believe it has access to the wide variety of diverse cultures, races, people, and activities that we love and would benefit a child as they grown and learn.  Spanish has been important in our lives and work, and we hope to raise children in a bilingual atmosphere and community.

We plan to share with our children our values of hard work, compassion, appreciation for diversity, and closeness of family.  We refinished our home ourselves through a lot of hard work, which is a value we learned from our parents' work on their houses growing up and a value which we'd like to share with our future children.

We are invested in working to build an open relationship between families to help our child know who they are and where they came from. We are open to exchanging photos and updates, keeping in touch through phone, email, and visits.

Thank you

We appreciate you taking time to learn about us, our community, and our hopes and dreams for our future family. More than anything, we want you to know that we will love your child unconditionally and will devote our lives to providing him or her with all the love, security and joy we can offer. We want your child to always know where he or she came from. We plan to raise our child with an understanding and appreciation for you and the decisions you are making for him or her. This child will be loved beyond words by us, by our families, by our friends, and he or she will always know the great love you have for him or her as well. Thank you again for considering us.