Sam & Eric
Ridgefield, CT
Hello! We are Sam and Eric in Ridgefield, CT. Thank you for taking the time to visit and learn about our life. We are in awe of your strength and the courage it takes as you contemplate making this decision. We would be grateful if you considered us as prospective adoptive parents of your child. There is so much love in our life and our family and we are very excited to share it raising a child. Please contact us with any questions or thoughts and we hope to hear from you soon!
— Sam & Eric
We met in 2016 through a dating app and from our first date, Sam was sure we would be together forever. Eric felt the same on the second date. When our families met, it felt like we had been one family since forever. It was the same meeting each other’s friends and the story of our relationship has been like a jigsaw puzzle fitting together. We love having a house full of our family and friends together, cooking meals, working in the garden, and going for walks.
Though our families live across the globe we are very present in each other’s lives and make excuses for visits and long stays together. In NYC we have built a network of close friends that are an extension of our family who we see nearly every day and celebrate the holidays and wins of life. We married in 2018 in a small wedding right before Christmas so we had the opportunity to spend the holiday as one family for the first time. We look forward to many more as our family grows each year.
Our jobs have taught us the importance of creating a community at work and we both strive to keep a healthy work-life balance. Coming home for dinner together every night and eating lunches packed by Sam every morning provide a stability that is at the heart of our life. Sam works as a fashion editor at a magazine in Manhattan and Eric works as an urban planning consultant in Queens. Our home outside the city in Connecticut is where we find our balance and draw our strength. Opening our home to raise a child and placing our family at the center of our lives brings us so much joy and excitement for what the future holds.
by Eric
“Sam is the most thoughtful and generous person I’ve ever met. He brings comfort to others and provides me with strength I never knew I had. His loving nature and charismatic charm make him the social one in our relationship. He loves people and getting to know others. Sam can make even the most reserved person in a room feel comfortable. He has a real talent for this!
Sam grew up in Wisconsin and made his way to NYC after spending his college years in Madison, WI where he studied English and Classics. He’s a human dictionary and an endless literary knowledge base. He has worked extremely hard in his career and is passionate about his work. Sam truly loves his job and his colleagues. When he’s not at work, Sam can be found whipping up a delicious meal, tending to the garden, or taking an early morning dip in the pool. Sam is a big kid at heart. You will often find him at the playground with one of our friends hanging around the monkey bars with their children. Kids light up around Sam. His love and playfulness are infectious. He is going to be an amazing father one day and I can’t wait to see him grow into parenthood.
Sam is always looking out for others and our planet. He is enthusiastic about preserving our environment and leaving behind a better Earth than we were given. He is generously supportive of LGBTQ issues. I am so proud to be married to such a big-hearted man.”
“Sam is a big kid at heart.”
—Eric
by Sam
“From the first time I met Eric, I knew he had the most integrity of anyone I’d ever known. He is kind, honest, thoughtful, and treats everyone with respect. This quality of treating everyone the same and being a consistent person in every situation I have found very grounding.
Eric grew up in rural Alabama with his parents, sister, and brother with whom he is still very close. However, he was excited to move to New York for college to learn more about a bigger world. He loves cities and all the diversity of perspectives and experience they represent. He loves to travel to new places and to learn about how others see and build their world. As a trained architect and urban planner, it is a joy to hear him describe what goes into building a city and his excitement about seeing new communities is infectious.
He is very loyal and has kept in contact with friends from high school, college, grad school, and each of his jobs. Eric has built a community of amazing people around him and is always keeping track of what those he loves are up to.”
“Eric is kind, honest, thoughtful, and treats everyone with respect.”
–Sam
Traveling is something we love. Sam travels to Europe every year for work and Eric usually takes advantage of the opportunity to explore a new city alongside him. Paris is a particularly favorite destination and we visit at least twice a year. It is important to us that our children have an opportunity to visit other countries, become familiar with other cultures and perspectives, and grow up with a greater understanding and appreciation of the world around us. Sam’s brother and his family live in Japan, where we love to visit them. Japan is where we got engaged and has become another favorite destination of ours and we expect to travel there frequently.
We love nature and both grew up in rural settings, so naturally our hobbies often involve being outdoors. When we aren’t traveling or working during the week in NYC, we spend most of our time in Connecticut. We love gardening, being outside with friends and family, and restoring our old house. Sam loves to cook and enjoys preparing big meals for friends. Eric can often be found working on a new project, of which there are many with any home! If you don’t find us around the house, we are often hiking the many nearby trails, running, antiquing, or visiting nearby friends.
We live in a home in Ridgefield, CT: a neighborhood of longstanding residents and new families. It is a warm community that reminds us of the small towns in which we both grew up. What we love is that, though it feels like a small town, there are several theaters, music venues, and a great variety of restaurants. The weekly concerts in the town park have been amazing in the last year.
We live on a quiet rural road but are five minutes from all the resources of the village. As we both grew up with nature around us, it has been a real blessing to have the opportunity to spend so much time outdoors. The small town community is very friendly and welcoming and we have met all our neighbors through backyard get togethers. Growing herbs and flowers in the garden and cooking meals with food we grew ourselves has brought a lot of joy and calm to our life but the greatest joy is being able to share this with our friends and our family.
Our family could not be more excited about us adopting! Our parents have retired and look forward to being active in the life of a new grandchild. We are both the youngest in the family and our siblings cannot wait to pass on what they’ve learned as parents to us.
Though our family is spread across the states and even the globe, we gather for holidays and also to celebrate the milestones of life. Sam’s mother moved to Connecticut in 2020 after his father passed away and it has been a blessing to share our daily lives. Eric’s mother is already looking forward to coming to help in those first months! We are always looking for reasons to get our family under one roof. Eric’s sister Angie had her first child, Riley in 2019 and his parents have been integral in his first year. Sam’s nieces and nephews are between the ages of 6 and 21 and all look forward to a new baby in the family.
We feel so lucky to have grown a family in New York City and Ridgefield that is full of young families and a network of people with so many different stories and backgrounds.
Thank you for taking a moment to learn more about us. We feel so blessed in our lives by the family we were born to and the family we have added to along the journey. We would be honored to welcome you to our family and pledge to treat you with respect and honesty through the process of this important decision. If you would like to know more about us, please don’t hesitate to ask.
— Sam & Eric
