State of the Family 2026

 2025 has been a very busy year, and we're hoping to regain some balance in 2026.

Adoption

We've matched with a little girl in Hong Kong: "Anya". While the process is slow and ongoing, we're hopeful that we'll be able to bring her home early next year. Unbelievably, we have been trying to adopt for 8 years. You'd think it'd be easier to give an orphan a home, but this has been a surprisingly long and arduous process.

Kids

Jaedyn is in her 2nd year at her private Christian school, and she loves it. She continues to enjoy playing soccer in our neighborhood league, but she's aging out of that and hopes to play for her school's middle school team this coming spring. She's growing up too quickly! She's into fashion and has become somewhat of a fashionista. She also started a cat-sitting business.

Kaleb moves from obsession to obsession. This past year it's been baseball, Legos, and Elvis — in that order. His baseball team won 2nd place in the city league. He enjoys putting together Lego Star Wars sets and listening to Elvis. He was also introduced to Harry Potter this past year and for some reason thinks he belongs in the Hufflepuff house — even though he can't name a single character from that house.

Jake & Kyla

Kyla still works for a clinic as a pediatric nurse practitioner. Her days are spent shuttling kids to activities and staying on top of our adoption process.

Jake's nonprofit, The Apologist Project, is picking up steam. Major ministries have signed up to share their content and implement chatbots using the platform. He's been crazy busy between that and his day job. Please pray for discernment and peace as he juggles his many obligations.

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.