Dear Birth-parent(s),

 

Our names are Helen Nguyen and Steven Heidenreich. We met at the University of Washington 8 years ago, and we just celebrated our 6th year wedding anniversary in June.

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Helen was born and raised in Seattle. Her parents and grandparents came to Seattle from Vietnam during the war. Her family is very large now, spread throughout Seattle, San Jose and Texas. She’s the oldest of 13 first cousins and has one little sister. Helen is extremely close to her family and does her best to always be in contact with them.

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Steve is originally from Chicago. His family is smaller and scattered around Illinois, Indiana, and Florida. He has one little sister too. His parents moved him and his younger sister to Seattle when they were kids and they’ve been living here ever since.  

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We’re both very close to our families, spending time with them often. We bought a home close to Helen’s grandparents so we could be just minutes away from all her family, without being too far from Steve’s either. Any child that becomes a part of our family will have a huge network of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and plenty of cousins who live nearby. They would never be far from family. Our families are more like a big village and we can’t wait to bring a new member into the family. 

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We met volunteering at church while in college, and connected over our shared values and sense of humor. We both have big personalities and fell in love quickly, knowing we wanted to share a life together. We are part of two parishes, one in Seattle and the other in Renton. God has been generous with us and we hope to pass on our Catholic faith to our own children.

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In our free time we’re pretty laid back, we garden and work on the house, we grill and try new food with friends and family. We go out or volunteer when we’re up for it, and when we don’t, we play with our little cousins or watch The Office again on Netflix. 

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Traveling and learning about the world is a lot of fun for us. Helen was raised speaking Vietnamese, and Steve learned Spanish traveling and living in Latin America. We hope to pass these languages onto our children if possible, and to help them learn and appreciate their own heritage, whatever it may be. We save our time and money and try to travel overseas at least every year or two. Our favorite countries so far are Portugal and Italy.

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We’re currently both working. Helen works at 3W Medical for Women, a non-profit women’s clinic in Seattle. After Helen got her Master’s in Social Work, she and Steve volunteered together on a new board to help create the clinic, and now she runs the place full-time as Executive Director. Steve used to work non-profit too, but he now works at an ad agency, running campaigns for a couple brands at General Motors. 

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We got married a little younger than usual in our mid-twenties, and have worked really hard to get ourselves in a position to start a family. We dreamed of having kids of our own, some biological and some adopted, and so Steve quit his job in non-profit to work in advertising instead. We lived on $0.99 boxes of Kraft mac & cheese in a tiny apartment far out of town so we could eventually buy a house and pay off our student loans. It was grueling and difficult, we relied heavily on our faith and families to make it through, but we’re now in a place where we can afford to raise kids and scale back on work so we can focus on being parents. We’re blessed with accommodating careers, and retired mothers who want to help with grandkids, so we’ll never have to put our kids in daycare.   

 

We’re playful people, we laugh often, we’re sarcastic and warm. We want to bring more laughter, and new smiles into our home. We always wanted to adopt and now is the right time. We want to share our lives with children we can call our own, and raise them to be the best, most fruitful people they can be. We’ve been lucky, blessed with good health, second chances, strong faith, and great families, and we want to share that. We’re just normal, hardworking people who want to give any child who needs a home the kind of childhoods we had or better. Whoever we bring into our home will be loved wholeheartedly, flaws and all, unconditionally.

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Thank you so much for your time and sacrifice,

Steve & Helen Heidenreich