Speakers: Doug & Michelle
Introduce yourselves!
Hi, I'm Doug. I'm Michelle. And this is Nora. Yeah, we live in a small mountain town in western North Carolina. We bought our dream property about a year ago because we love the proximity to hiking biking and the small town feel. We're also excited about the great schools, the many festivals and being near family and within an hour of a few bigger cities for additional opportunities. Our property here is large and there's many hiking trails and streams and my fort like streams and hiking and this amazing mountain view. We love where we live and we also love what we do for work. We own our own business in the outdoor hospitality and recreation business. This means that we get to help other people enjoy the outdoors too. It also means that we get to set our own work schedule So one or both of us are available.
When thinking about the future, what type of relationship do you hope to have with your child's birth family?
We consider ourselves to be friendly and outgoing people and we are always glad to add to our social circle. Definitely, we have friends and family across the country and we intentionally put in effort to maintain those relationships. We do that with regular phone and video calls, emails, social media updates and visits when possible. We would absolutely support and encourage contact with our child's birth mom and family at whatever level is comfortable for everyone involved. It is so important for a child to understand where he or she comes from. And we don't think that you can ever have too many people loving you and cheering you on. In fact, we would want to be cheering the birth mom on too and whatever her aspirations and successes are.
What one word describes your family best? Why?
Word on 3. 1...2...3. Adventurous! That's what we are. What other family do you know that took their child that was 18-months-old on a 500-mile, 8-week backpacking trip on the Colorado Trail, across the State of Colorado. It's true. We loved it. She loved it and it was my first long distance trail and Michelle's 7th. Outside of that, we spend so much time outside. We're outside almost every day on our property. We hike bike, ski, play tennis, whitewater kayak. Uh, you name it outdoors and we're trying it. If we haven't already tried it, we probably want to and have it on our bucket list and we're excited to do whatever outdoor adventures. Nora is excited about in the future and any other child who joins our family. Yep, we love being outside. We're an adventure family.
What makes your family stand out?
What makes our family stand out? I don't know. That's a tough one. Yeah because we've already talked about the fact that we're adventurous, and she said I wasn't allowed to talk about owning a fire tower. So I guess let's talk about our non-traditional lifestyles, non-traditional in the best way. Right. So I started buying real estate at 19 and bought and sold some properties and I made some good profits and came to the property that we're on right now. And when Michelle and I met and started working together, we were the perfect complement of skill sets and we really grew our business. Yeah. So Doug's got the handyman skills, he can fix anything, he can do upgrades, repairs. And then I have a background in safety and also in project and recreation management. So together we were able to enhance and modernize the business and really streamline processes and get to a point where we can manage the business this remotely much of the time and we have just a great deal of flexibility with our schedule. Yeah, and this allows us to spend so much time together as a family and we've experienced all of Nora's milestones together and we really look forward to being able to share those moments as our family grows. Yeah. One of our favorite traditions that this schedule allows us is the ability to do Adventure Wednesdays. And that's where a couple of times a month, we just take a whole day and spend the day as a family and we go check out something new, explore, maybe eat dinner out. We try to be technology-free and just really present and with each other and it's just really helped us to grow our relationships and enjoy time together. Yeah. So that was a long winded way of saying what makes us unique is the amount of quality time that we get to spend together every single day and we aren't tired of each other yet.
