State of the Family 2025

As 2024 draws to a close, we're reminded of all the blessings God has seen fit to bestow us. We're all happy and healthy, and at the end of the day that's all we can ask for.

Adoption

China has officially closed its adoption program, bringing a sad conclusion to our adoption saga from the mainland. We have entered the Hong Kong adoption program in hopes of still being able to bring an ethnically Chinese orphan into our home. We have not been matched yet, but we hope to be in the coming year. The Hong Kong program works a little differently; families all apply as each child becomes available, and then a family is selected from the applicants.

Kids

Jaedyn has started a new academic adventure (AKA middle school) at Hill Country Christian School of Austin. It took her a while to admit it, but she loves it. Having a couple friends has certainly helped. They don't do school sports for 6th graders so they can focus on adapting to more academic rigor, but they keep her busy with homework and clubs.

Kaleb still attends his elementary school and has become obsessed with baseball. He found a very encouraging team and a good coach. We're just happy to see him so excited about any sport, even if it's not a sport we're as fond of personally. ;)

Jake & Kyla

Kyla is still working at Austin Diagnostic Clinic as a pediatric nurse practitioner. She also enjoys using her lactation certification to see patients struggling with breast-feeding.

Jake still leads Product for Cloud Campaign, a social media management startup out of Colorado. His nonprofit, The Apologist Project is going strong, with a 1st place overall win at the Indigitous #HACK 2024 event, as well as a 2nd place in challenge win at Gloo's AI & the Church hackathon. It builds conversational AIs for evangelism and an apologetics directory.

 

State of the Family 2024

2023 has been a difficult year on several fronts; we'll be glad to see the backside of it.

Adoption

China has resumed its adoption operations for matched families with travel approval. Unfortunately, we no longer fall into that group since Jesslyn was returned to her birth mother. China has not resumed its full program, and no new matches have been made. We're therefore still in a holding pattern until they do so, at which point we restart the entire process. There are rumors that the adoption program won't ever fully resume, but we're hopeful that's not the case. We remain committed to adopting from mainland China as we wait for God's timing.

Kids

Both Jaedyn and Kaleb are happy and healthy, and we enjoy watching them grow in mind, body, and spirit. Jaedyn has been playing with the same group of girls on her soccer team for several years. Kaleb has taken up martial arts and has stuck with it better than any other extra-curricular activity we've ever put him in. He never complains about it like he did with soccer and drumming. Both kids continue to be involved with Awana and Sunday school programs.

We have discussed putting Jaedyn in a private Christian middle school for years — mainly due to the poor disciplinary and moral standards of the local middle school. We've also become acutely aware of our school district's lackluster academic standards, exacerbated by the well-documented education gap brought on by the pandemic. Unfortunately, we've had to keep both kids in tutoring on the side just to keep them from lagging further behind. We can clearly see that their public school education is heading in the wrong direction.

For these reasons, we're strongly considering putting both of them in private school. This will be a huge financial burden, but it seems inevitable given that the school system is failing us on all fronts. Kaleb is already on the waitlist, and Jaedyn is finishing up her final interview in early January.

Employment & Projects

There were major changes to Jake's company's leadership in early 2023 that prompted him to seek other employment opportunities. While it was incredibly stressful to be a job-seeker during one of the worst environments for tech workers in history where we saw the industry shed hundreds of thousands of jobs, we were fortunate that our savings saw us through to him landing a new role in October. He was fortunate to field 2 simultaneous offers, and ended up accepting a product leadership role with a white-labeled social media management platform: Cloud Campaign.

In the intervening months between April and October while looking for a job, Jake finally made good on his long-term goal of starting a Christian apologetics ministry. The Apologist Project is a nonprofit on a mission to break down barriers to belief through a conversational AI trained on a range of topics in Christian apologetics and intellectually stimulating, community-led discourse. The conversational AI is currently in beta, and he's actively reaching out to content partners and looking to make the project publicly available in early 2024. Jake has also enrolled in the Colson Fellows program and will be graduating in May of next year.

Kyla remains employed as a pediatric nurse practitioner at a clinic here in Austin. Following the departure of a pediatrician in our community, she had the opportunity to work at her clinic's branch right here in our neighborhood for 4/5 days of the week. She was able to set her own hours, which allowed her to align with the kids' school day. She also bumped up her hours overall to help us through the period when Jake was unemployed. This has been a major blessing overall that aligned perfectly with our financial needs, though Kyla is busier than ever. The work itself has been challenging as her clinic is consistently losing personnel to higher-paying competitors.

Travel

We've understandably been more limited in our travel this past year due to Jake being unemployed for around 6 months. We used the opportunity to do knock out some items on our domestic bucket list. We saw Monticello, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York over spring break. In late June, we went to Rocky Mountains National Park and drove up to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands National Park before spending a week at Jake's brother's cabin in northern Minnesota over the 4th of July holiday.

State of the Family 2023

Things returned to some semblance of normal in 2022. Pandemic fatigue was in full-swing, and we threw caution (and our masks) to the wind as we socialized freely, went to movie theaters, and traveled internationally.

Adoption

Our appeal to continue to matched to Jesslyn went unanswered, and unfortunately we are now faced with the prospect of starting the entire adoption process over again. We are wary to do so for obvious reasons, until China re-opens fully and we have some confidence that the process won't get stalled again.

Kids

Jaedyn has been enjoying 4th grade and playing soccer on a team with her friends. Kaleb is growing up quickly as he navigates 1st grade. He was in soccer this past fall, but his interests lie elsewhere. We will likely put him in some kind of martial arts class in the spring. Both kids continue to attend Chinese class in-person and remote (when necessary).

Travel

We held off on travel for the first half of the year as Jake was ramping up at his new job, and we were still in limbo with our adoption. But it wasn't too long before the travel bug got the better of us.

The whole family visited Ontario and Quebec in Canada on the 4th of July weekend with a group of friends. We saw Niagara Falls, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Quebec City.

Jake and Kyla did a quick trip to Panama over the long Columbus Day weekend. We saw the Panama Canal and lots of ruins. We rented a car like we did in Costa Rica, but driving there was much more difficult than anywhere else Jake had driven. But we drove all over the country unscathed!

Finally, the whole family took a 2-week trip to the Hawaiian islands over the Thanksgiving break. We visited the Big Island and saw Kilauea volcano near the end of its eruption. We were at the summit of Mauna Loa 6 days before it started erupting. Next we went to Maui, where we drove the Road to Hana and saw lots of waterfalls. Oahu was next, where we snorkeled and saw Pearl Harbor and the Polynesian Cultural Center. We ended our trip on Kauai, where we did a helicopter ride around the island and into the crater of the dormant volcano that created the island. Overall, it was an absolutely incredible trip!

Pets

Lila (cat), Dahlia (dog), and Frosty (cat) are happy and healthy. 

We had been looking to get a 2nd black lab in mid-December right when we returned from Hawaii to maximize our time with the puppy w/o travel. We picked our favorite breeders and contacted them in October, but it seemed that none of them were keen on being of much help until there were confirmed litters. We were about to give up when out of the blue, one of our backup breeders told us that a colleague of hers had a black lab unexpectedly become available.

It turned out that the unexpectedly available puppy was from our top pick breeder that had originally not been great at getting back to us. So we all piled into the car to go get her the following weekend after we returned from Hawaii. The timing could not have been more perfect. The kids were ecstatic. "Jasmine" or "Jas" (pronounced "Jazz") is a gorgeous and fun puppy. She plays well with Dahlia and enjoys chasing Frosty around the house.

Employment

Jake is doing very well as Head of Product as the startup he works for in Austin. He has a hybrid arrangement where he goes into the office about twice a week. Kyla still works part-time for a pediatric clinic, where she also gets to utilize her lactation consultant certification.

State of the Family 2022

 If 2020 was the year that time forgot, 2021 is the year we made up for it. We have personal and professional updates galore! We said goodbye to a long-serving family pet and Jake's COVID beard (RIP). We said hello to new family pets and professional opportunities. Just like last year, even the pandemic can't keep us from traveling.

Adoption

We spent most of 2021 still in a waiting pattern for China to open back up for travel so that we could bring Jesslyn home. However, in November we received word that the little girl we’ve been waiting in limbo for 2 years to adopt is no longer eligible for adoption. We were told that the birth mother was found. At first we consoled ourselves with the thought that being with her birth mother is what’s really best for her.

But we subsequently found out more details that have led us to believe the mother may not in fact actually want her back. It’s against the law to abandon a child in China. Apparently, recent legislation has been passed that has resulted in more stringent enforcement of that law. We’ve been told that the police matched the birth mother through DNA sampling with the express purpose of forcing her to reclaim the child or face punishment.

The letter announcing that she is now ineligible to be adopted was dated July 29, yet we have seen photos of her still at the orphanage as recently as October 1st, over 2 months later. We've written a letter of appeal and sent it both to the China Center of Children's Welfare and Adoption, as well as the group in the US State Department that handles international adoptions. We just want what’s best for our little girl, and it doesn’t seem like forcing her mother to take her back against her will is what’s best for anyone.

Kids

Jaedyn has been thriving in-person in her 3rd grade class. She's enjoyed playing soccer on a team with her friends and performed at her first piano recital. She continues to attend Mandarin classes.

Kaleb started Kindergarten this year and lost his first tooth. We're glad that he was put in a class with Jaedyn's former Kindergarten teacher. He also attends Mandarin classes, piano lessons, and has been playing on a soccer team.

With both kids now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, we're looking forward to their lives going back to some semblance of normalcy, with regular play dates and easier travel.

Pets

In May we lost Daphne, our beloved black lab. She lived to a ripe old age of 14. We filled the void in July with the arrival of a new black lab puppy, Dahlia. We also adopted Frosty, a Siamese ragdoll kitten and littermate of our niece Bryn's new kitten.

(Mostly Domestic) Travel

In March we went to Utah with the kids and a group of friends to do a tour of national parks, including Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches. Near the end of the school year, we took the kids to Disney World. In June, we headed to Minnesota for a gathering of Jake's family to celebrate his parents' 50th wedding anniversary. The itch to travel to more exotic lands caught up with us in the fall as we traveled to Puerto Rico and Cost Rica in October and November.

Employment

Kyla continues to work part-time as a pediatric nurse practitioner at a pediatric clinic. She's had increasing opportunities to put her lactation consultant certification to good use.

Jake is starting a new position in just before the end of the year as Head of Product at membersy, a digital health company that provides Dental Service Organizations (DSOs) with dental membership plans for their patients. He's looking forward to the increased challenge!