Introducing Ourselves

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We've just started this little blog to introduce ourselves as prospective adoptive parents. We hope you can get a good idea about who we are & what our backgrounds are, as well as our hopes & dreams for our own family in the future.

Early Years

We feel like it's important to know what our formative years were like. We both had happy childhoods, and hope we can give our children lots of the things we were so blessed to have.

Kaarina grew up in central Utah surrounded by mountains. She's a middle child in a family of six girls. She had a vivid imagination, fueled by lots of reading and no tv. Her sisters were great playmates and accomplices in all kinds of fun and games. Her family went hiking and camping a lot. She loved dancing from an early age and her parents were very supportive for years and years of ballet classes, rehearsals, and performances. Her family had three cherry trees, two peach trees, an apricot tree, and a garden, so there was lots of fruit picking and helping her mom can fruit and beans in the summers! Some of her best memories are fishing with a couple of sisters and her Finnish grandpa in the summers. Her sisters are her best friends.

Here's Kaarina (on the right) showing off the shells she's gathered with two sisters at a lake, with her dad talking to her grandpa and grandma by their VW bus.



















Forrest grew up in northern California and northwestern Oregon. The sixth of seven children, he and his siblings have wonderful memories of tree houses, goats, chickens and horses, playing in streams, and generally running wild in the way children of previous generations could. They also went camping together often. Forrest comes from a very musical family. Everyone plays at least one instrument, and they've grown up singing harmonies together. He learned to work on cars from his big brothers. In high school he rebuilt the engine of his '71 Ford pickup, which his family still uses regularly. Forrest learned to love aviation from his father and grandfather, both of whom are pilots and own small aircraft. Forrest got his pilot's license at 18.

Here's a young Forrest on the back porch playing his trumpet.

Here and Now

A little bit about what we're up to these days:

Forrest finds his work as an estimator challenging and rewarding. He teaches teenagers in Sunday school, and also helps Kaarina in the nursery. He likes to play his guitar in the evenings, go for walks together when the weather is cooler, and will often go for early Saturday morning bike rides.

Kaarina loves her work as a nanny for two wonderful families. She also enjoys spending time with our pets, keeping in touch with friends, and making things, which usually means knitting or sewing these days.

We like to go to Mount Charleston on the weekends when the weather's too hot in the valley here. It feels like an entirely different world with trees and meadows and cool breezes. We try to maintain a little garden on our condo balcony, and look forward to mastering the challenges of desert gardening when we have a house.




















For our vacations, mostly we visit our families in Oregon or Utah. We also plan on going somewhere a little more exciting or exotic every once in awhile. This summer we had a really fun vacation to Costa Rica.

Future Dreams

Here's a bit about how we imagine our future family life.

The company Forrest works for as an estimator is one of the best in the construction industry, and we plan on staying with them. However, being close to family is important to us. We love the Pacific Northwest, where most of Forrest's family lives. We could also see ourselves living closer to Kaarina's family somewhere on Utah's Wasatch Front. So for now, while Forrest’s company is not currently located in either place, we're just trying to focus on learning from and enjoying the present. We'll see what the future holds.

Regardless of where we end up, we'd like to have a modest, comfortable house with a good plot of land where our kids can run and play and we can grow a garden. We dream of raising chickens and maybe goats. We'd like to live somewhere close enough to a "big city," yet definitely not too far from the countryside as well. We both daydream about living in a small town as we drive through the western states on road trips, but in reality we both very much enjoy the amenities of larger city.

We usually imagine ourselves with 3 to 5 children. We both come from large families, and want to strike a balance between the fun and learning that comes from lots of siblings, and the time and individual attention available in a smaller family setting. Right now, we're just working on #1!

Music will be a big part of our family life, although perhaps less central than it was in Forrest's family growing up, as Kaarina isn't graced with much musical ability. Forrest loves to "play" musically, and can't seem to stop himself from singing snatches of songs, whistling, and experimenting on his guitar or keyboard. He still plays the trumpet as well, and dreams of being part of a community philharmonic orchestra.

Although we love the atmosphere in our home, and both can tend to be homebodies, some of our favorite times together are spent in the great outdoors. Since these are some of our favorite memories from childhood, we dream of going camping, hiking, and boating often as a family. We each grew up sailing and canoeing as well, and this is still a big part of our extended family activities.

Both of our families encouraged us to develop our talents in many different arenas. While we think children tend to be over-scheduled these days, we also remember how invaluable it was for us to have our parents support us in going for our dreams. We're excited to see our children blossom into whoever they want to be, and to give them the freedom and support they need to explore their talents.

One of the most important things for us in raising our children is to provide them with the heritage of faith that has been our hope and our strength. On either side of our family lines we have recent newcomers to the Mormon faith, as well as pioneer ancestors who crossed the plains to Utah. While we find fulfillment in many areas of life and love learning from a wide variety of spiritual thoughts, the way our religion informs our thoughts and beliefs is absolutely central to us.

It’s fun to dream about everything the future may hold, and it’s also important for us that we are happy in the moment. Although we wouldn’t have chosen to wait to have children, we count it a blessing to have this time together as a couple. So we’re enjoying life as it comes, and looking forward to the joys and challenges of a family!