Sarah and I both grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Most people are surprised given our current lifestyle that you’d have to go back a few generations in either of our families to find a farmer. Sarah has always been an animal lover. Her dad took her to the zoo every Tuesday after school. She had guinea pigs, cats, dogs, and even Cleopatra, a tadpole who never turned into a frog. She stopped eating meat at twelve years old, basically as soon as she really understood that it came from animals. She also famously got her family to stop eating meat by putting a passive-aggressive sticky note in the fridge: “The only way to stop eating meat is to stop buying it”.

Three years later, we met on the first day, in the first class of high school. She was a cutesy girl with a headband, golden ringlets, and chunky jewelry. I was an emo kid with a duct tape hat, a skull on my baggy sweater, and ragged hair down to my shoulders. Despite all that, she immediately fell in love (it took me another year of brooding to come to my senses). We have been together ever since. Over the years, her compassion opened my eyes to the harm I was doing. I stopped eating meat, we talked about starting a family, and starting a sanctuary (we even picked Gwendolyn’s name out when we were still in high school!).

We ended up in Seattle for college. We both studied at UW, her for theater production and architecture, me for human computer interaction in informatics. We moved in together Junior year and adopted a rescue kitten from The NOAH Center, and later a second cat from a friend.

After graduation, we stayed in Seattle. Me for the thriving startup tech scene and her for the thriving real-estate market. I started my formal programming career (ExtraHop) and she bought a house in Ballard, and started managing a boutique bridal business in Greenlake (Calla Bridal). And we finally got married!

After 5 years in Ballard, I had moved to Pioneer Square Labs, and Sarah and purchased Calla Bridal from its original owner and remodeled every room in the house. We were ready to start our family.

Well you know what they say about best laid plans… turns out I have a gene mutation (BRCA2) that we considered too dangerous to knowingly risk passing to a child. No problem, we’ll do IVF with PGD… turns out we both have unrelated fertility issues that make it extremely hard to reproduce even with IVF so the cycle failed. Okay cool, loooove a physically, emotionally, and financially intensive process that doesn’t get you anything. We did some soul searching (and therapy) and decided to pursue adoption. But adoption really doesn’t facilitate planning. We did all the classes, interviews, and certifications to get home study approved. We hired attorneys, made our profile, and then… we waited. The call can come tomorrow, or it can take years.

So while we waited for that dream to become a reality, we decided to pursue another: the sanctuary! We toured rural properties all over around Seattle and were uninspired until we found this property on Whidbey and completely fell in love. 15 acres of rolling pasture, bordered by wooded creeks, with existing outbuildings, and views of the Olympic Mountains. We scrambled to get our house market ready, we negotiated terms and financing, we worked around a pre-planned trip to Ireland and spent two weeks in a hotel with the cats while the house was being shown.

Oh and while all of that was happening, we got matched with an expectant mom who liked our adoption profile. Everything was finally lining up! We moved into the Whidbey house and we flew down to San Bernardino when baby girl was born. The birth mom was nice, the baby was perfect. Then everything went off the rails again… birth parents disappeared from the hospital without being discharged. We got a report saying the baby had been born with nicotine, THC, and meth in her blood. We were discharged from the hospital with baby girl in our care but no permanent legal right to her. Birth parents changed their minds. CPS stepped in and took the baby when the adoption agreement fell through. After waiting, wishing for, falling in love, and being her parents for the first three days of her life, we flew back to Washington alone and in shock (I was later diagnosed with and treated for PTSD, Generalized Anxiety, and Depression by a psychiatrist who used to work at the VA).

We got home and hunkered down for a month. Sarah did her art (and got second place in a national contest!) and we all tried to deal with our grief. JUST KIDDING, I never got past the denial phase. I hired three more lawyers and spent the month secretly working with the paternal birth grandmother to get the birth parents back on board and to pull baby girl out of the California foster system. And it miraculously worked! A month later I (well, actually our home study case worker…) revealed to Sarah that I had been working on this the whole time and that we needed to go back to San Bernardino to appear in Juvenile Dependency Court. The next day, on my birthday in 2018, I got the best gift ever: permanent custody of our daughter, Gwendolyn.

The next three years is the story you already know. We became a family of three humans, and just kept saying yes. Yes to cows. Yes to goats. Yes to the next and the next. Maybe because we were blissfully happy, and traumatized, by our arrival into parenthood that we just kept saying “we will figure it out”. And we have. With so much learning along the way. We have made mistakes, big and small, but have always gotten back up after our falls with greater determination. And the healing power of animals has soothed our wounds.

Gwen has grown into a fierce and beautiful pre-schooler. We have scaled the farm to accommodate 65 permanent residents. And most importantly, we met all of you! This sanctuary is our labor of love, but it’s only possible because of the amazing donors and volunteers who have fallen as much in love with our residents as we have. We are planning a board expansion and our second annual fundraiser. We are even starting to think about our first part-time paid staffer, but Sarah and I will never take a salary (and we will probably always personally fund a significant amount of Ballydídean’s budget.)

Thank you all so much. We always feel self-conscious talking about ourselves and want to put the animals first. But I also know people are curious so I hope this has helped you get to know us better!

Our Origin Story