A Primer

We are just a typical family living in the Midwest.    My wife and I are both southern transplants living in the Kansas City area.   Our son Tucker was born after we moved up here in Missouri, and our daughter Harper is from China.

That said, there are some misconceptions that probably should be cleared up at this point.   First off, Kansas City is not in Kansas, its in Missouri.  See:

KC_Location

Secondly, while we live on the Kansas side, we don’t live way out on some desolate treeless plain hundreds of miles from anything.   We actually only live 2 miles inside of Kansas and about 5 minutes from downtown Kansas City.    In fact, the entire area is fairly hilly, and we have tons of trees.   Moreover, we live in a large and diverse metropolitan area of 2 million people:

Downtown_KC

I am from Arkansas (God’s Country):

ozarkwaterfalls

Tiffani is from Texas (Big state that produces really crappy Presidents):

TexasFlag

We moved up here in November of 1999.   Originally we thought we would only be up here a few years, but we ended up setting down roots here, having kids, buying a home, pursuing careers, and doing pretty much all the things responsible adults tend to do at some point.   I work in IT in a rather trendy office for a publisher and Tiffani works as a paralegal on the Plaza.   We are currently in the process of adopting our daughter’s friend Zhen Zhen from China so our family of four (plus a dog and a cat), will soon be a family of 5.   We are stopping there as neither of us have any desire to follow the example of the Duggars (a fundamentalist family with about 20 kids or so living in Northern Arkansas – featured on TLC).

Tucker and I are both really outdoorsy, Harper and Tiffani are not so much.   Hardly a weekend goes by that we are not out fishing, going on a day trip, or on some outdoors related excursion (backpacking, canoe trips).    Kansas City has some nice lakes in the area and trails.    There is a fair amount of culture here, but its not an outdoors mecca by any means so generally, backpacking trips require some travel.   We will be in China soon and will be reporting on our experience while there.