Hi there!
We’re the Stanley’s! I’m Katie and my wife’s name is Lauren. We have been together for 11 years now, and met when we were just wild teenagers. We wanted to share a little back story of our relationship before we jump into the process of how we made our family! We met fifteen years ago, and at the time, Lauren was my sisters’ best friend. Through their friendship, we all became close but since she is four years older than me, she went off to college, life happened, and we lost touch for a bit. Fast forward 4 years later to 2009 and we reconnected when I left home for college at the same school Lauren went to! We started hanging out every day, and quickly became inseparable. A few skipped classes, target dates, adventures around San Francisco, and a first date to Santa Cruz later, we started officially dating!
The next year, Lauren graduated from college and moved back home, which meant we were going to be long distance. This typically wouldn’t be terribly difficult, except for the fact that we weren’t out to our parents yet. Some of my family is extremely conservative, especially about the LGBTQ+ community, so I knew that I had to have a plan in place for when they did find out. We’ll save the coming out stories for another post, but five years later we were both finally out and proud to our families. Since we knew that we were both committed to forever, we moved into our first apartment together in 2014! In 2015, we got engaged and planned the sweetest, most intimate wedding that turned out exactly how we wanted it. We got married on September 16, 2016, on our seven year dating anniversary (16 is our lucky number if you couldn’t tell)!
We soon moved out of our tiny apartment and into a house with my sister, brother-in-law and baby nephew, Liam! A few years passed, and decided that we were ready to start our family. We felt like we were in the best place in our lives to be able to give a child everything we could imagine, but knew that it was going to take a while to achieve our dream. We started the process in April of 2019 and couldn’t wait to see where this adventure was going to take us! It took a bit of time, but not as long as we were expecting, and on July 16, 2020, we welcomed our beautiful baby girl, Camden, into the world!
Whether you are on here just to read our stories or looking for helpful information, we hope that you enjoy reading our blog. We discovered that when we were beginning the process of starting a family, there wasn’t a lot of helpful information that was relevant to LGBTQ+ couples, and many people in our lives were curious of the steps it took for us, so we figured that we should share our journey!
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