We are currently a family of 3: we have a daughter named Maia. She is five years old and is about to finish her first year of school (kindergarten) this spring. She is curious, creative and excited to explore the world - but wanting to do it on her own terms.

Maia always wants to be a part of whatever the family is doing. She likes school (and preschool before it) as a way to engage with other kids and learn new things. She's an avid communicator - as a baby with hand signs and sounds and these days through frequent stories about "her unicorns."

Maia makes friends easily and seems to run into them wherever we go. She plays with friends from school, goes trick or treating with her friends in the neighborhood and has play dates with our friends' kids from across town.

Our daily life has a balance of structured and free time for her. Water safety is important to us and we take her to swim lessons once a week. Other days we may enjoy downtime by playing video games together on the couch or having impromptu dance parties in the kitchen. When we have good weather, she likes to ride her strider bike down to school. She likes the process of preparing food and we like to let her help out in the kitchen - from baking cookies to feeding the cats in the morning.

We share a lifelong passion for space - it's what brought us together and continues to shape who we are today.

We both grew up with dreams of being astronauts. This drove an excitement in science and a motivation for us to excel in school. We followed this path through undergraduate degrees in physics and then to graduate studies in astrophysics at Arizona State University.

Graduate school was a perfect place for us to meet each other. We bonded over galaxies coursework in coffee shops, while setting up telescopes for the undergraduate classes we taught in the evenings and unwinding with desert hikes in the weekends. Before long, we knew we wanted to be with each other in a bigger way - as people, as a family, for good.

We left grad school, but kept the interest and excitement about space that had brought us there. Our careers progressed through different research and software jobs, before (both) landing in the field of satellite imaging. Currently, this includes having an active role in the mission operations room during a new satellite launch - for us, a dream come true.

Our passion for space goes beyond an occupation. Witnessing astronomical events together has grown from stargazing dates into repeating family traditions - including camping trips for dark skies during annual meteor showers and taking road trips or even international vacations for the chance to experience phenomena like Eclipses and Aurora.

Adventures are part of who we are. Adventures help us grow as individuals, bring us together as a family and give us something to look forward to and be excited about. We are passionate world travelers and seek to share these experiences with our children.

Adventures give us a chance to challenge ourselves. In 2016, we planned a short trip to Japan and decided on a goal of climbing Mt. Fuji together. Before the trip, we did research, made reservations, even some practice hikes. Climbing Fuji involved train rides, hiking through forests and rocky landscapes, sleeping in a small mountain lodge with new customs and finally pushing through to a cloudy summit. It took everything we had to get there, physically, logistically and mentally, but it was an experience we will keep forever.

We saw our first total solar eclipse in 2017. It was a deep and profound experience for us and we immediately knew that if we ever had children, we'd want to share this with them. Maia was born just over a year later. In 2024, we took a family trip to see the eclipse from Mazatlán, Mexico. It was a fantastic experience and her first foreign-language trip (she loved showing off her Spanish knowledge!). The three of us sat together on the beach next to her sandcastle as the midday sun dipped into complete darkness. It was an unforgettable experience.

Our four-bedroom house is located in a neighborhood surrounded by schools and open space. Walk down the street in one direction and you will find open space with hiking trails, a reservoir for kayaking, cows and sheep roaming the fields and expansive mountain views. Walk down the street in the other direction and you are at the doorstep of the elementary school. Both the middle school and high school are connected by walkable open space trails. A block away from our house, there is a neighborhood park with a play structure and a large field that is used for a yearly Easter Egg Hunt and holiday caroling. Children of all ages line our street, from infants to high schoolers and the neighborhood goes all-out for Halloween with decorations and dozens of excited children going door to door.

When you walk in the front door to our home, the entry room is filled with instruments (piano, guitars, ukuleles and a variety of small percussion instruments). Upstairs, the two children's rooms, one for Maia and one for your child, have their own Jack-n-Jill bathroom and walk-in closets. We are already starting to fill the nursery with love, baby furniture, books and artwork. The nursery has a beautiful view of the mountains and is filled with warm light at sunset.

Our home is filled with games and music. When friends come over, we turn up the music, play board games, grill food outside and have dance parties. Our favorite family tradition is going camping for the Perseids meteor shower in August every year. In the autumn, we go on hikes to see the beautiful aspen trees turn gold in the mountains. We also love winter holiday traditions! Our favorite activities are Denver Zoo Lights and the Georgetown Loop Railroad Santa train. At home, we play holiday music and bake candy cane cookies (a recipe passed down through Wendy's family for generations).

Wendy's mom, who lives 20 minutes away, is a very involved and loving grandma. On weekends, our daughter Maia goes to grandma's house, which is situated in a neighborhood with a large playground and many young children.

Our family and close friends have been immensely supportive of our adoption plans and excited to welcome a child into their hearts and lives.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our family! We are Bryce and Wendy. We met in graduate school for astrophysics in Arizona and were friends for several years before falling in love over coffee shop study dates. We got married in 2013 shortly before moving to Colorado to build our life and family together. In 2018 we were blessed with a daughter and we are now on the journey to expand our family through adoption.

We admire your bravery on this journey. We respect you and respect that you have a lot to figure out and consider right now. For us, being considered here is an honor. We hope this profile gives you a good view into who we are and what we are like, or at least serves as a starting point for getting to know us.

We see adoption as a choice and an opportunity, for everyone. We are choosing to do this with intention and we know it is the ideal way to grow our family. For us, adoption would be an opportunity to nurture another human being into our family. It would be a way to expand our family beyond ourselves and our own backgrounds, to bring in a new voice, a new background, a new story and join it with our own.

We want you to know that we consider this to be a shared journey with you and we want to support your needs and hopes throughout the process. The most important thing for us is understanding what you envision in the upcoming months and years and how we can commit to honoring your wishes, even as they evolve over time. We can provide email updates, pictures (printed and uploaded to a digital frame) and written letters.

We imagine an adopted child as naturally fitting in as the fourth member of our small family. They would grow up with their own bedroom upstairs, an older sister in the next room over and cats that may try to cuddle them within a week. Once they start elementary school, we'd walk them down the sidewalk to school in the mornings. In the summers, we'd take them out camping in the mountains, possibly near the snowcapped peaks they can see from their bedroom. They'd be involved in daily family conversations, which means they'd hear about everything from space science to unicorns to gardening plans. And they'd be listened to - their interests would become our interests, starting with the books we read to them at night. They'd have role models in the form of two highly educated parents with technical careers, a wide network of support from family and friends and a safe, happy, forward-thinking community to grow up in.

Every family is unique. If we become a family that grows through adoption, we will be a family that is unique because of you - and that is something that we will proudly hold as part of our story. We will be honest and open about the adoption to a child, as well as everyone else. We believe in parenting by giving children an accurate, age appropriate understanding of the world and this would include telling a child how adoption makes THEM unique. We will try to answer any questions a child might have, while listening to and respecting your input as well. A child adopted by our family would grow up knowing that their story goes through two families, who had to work together to make things turn out this way and have each contributed love to making that person who they are.

Bryce & Wendy