Joshua and Shadi

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From Us to You

Dear Expectant Mother,
Thank you for taking the time to read our letter. We’re sure this process is daunting and that you’re filled with emotions that we may not fully understand. However, if you have decided that it’s in the best interests of you and your child to find them a caring family who will love them unconditionally and treat them as their own, we are grateful and count ourselves as blessed that you are considering our family.

We are a family of three as we already have a biological daughter who is eight years old, named Daniella “Dani.” As far back as when we first met, we both agreed that adoption was something we wanted to pursue. Our family has a lot of love to give and we want to provide a good home to a child. Having discussed our plan to adopt with Dani, she has been giddy with excitement. She can’t wait to have a sister or a brother, she asks about it daily, and often imagines out loud all the fun things she’ll do with her new sibling.
To give you an idea of what our lives are like, we work from home which enables us to have very flexible schedules. Josh works as a consultant in the higher education market and Shadi works for a tech company. The flexibility allows us to spend a lot of time at home and enables us to take fun trips together as a family.

We want to give our children the tools to choose any path they want and to succeed in that path. We love to explore new hobbies and skills and our children will get all the benefits of private lessons in any field they desire, like dance, singing, sports, arts and more. At home we do puzzles, have lots of movie nights, cook and bake together, enjoy arts and crafts, and visit Grandma and Grandpa for BBQs.
I hope this helps you envision your child in our family. Our family is our life and we can’t wait for it to grow. We look forward to speaking with you and discussing how best to share their life with you.

Thank you for your consideration,
Josh & Shadi

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About Shadi

Top 5 Things I love about Shadi: (by Josh)

1) She loves unconditionally
2) She’s a very good mom
3) She’s a kind human
4) She’s protective of our family
5) She’s a good role model

I think about Shadi in everything I do because she is the foundation of my life. Daniella and I rely on her every day, and she means more to us than she’ll ever know. Shadi has fully committed to our family and she gives us her all. She makes sure that we always feel cared for and looked after by cooking delicious meals, planning fun events around our schedules, making sure we both stay on task at work and at school, hosting play dates for Daniella and her friends, coordinating after-school activities and planning fun trips for us to take.

Although Shadi understands that the world is a very unfair place, she works hard to make it feel less unfair by trying to find solutions to problems that she feels are being ignored. Every year Shadi assembles care packages filled with blankets, clothes, food, personal care items and cash for the unhoused in our community and hands them out hoping she will put a smile on someone’s face. It’s incredible the way she loves unconditionally and is filled with compassion for those less fortunate or in need of help.

She focuses both Daniella and I on the things we are good at and she helps us improve the things that need work. She wants the best for her family, and wants us to have a sense of obligation to push ourselves to be better and more socially responsible people. Shadi takes care of us and puts us first every day. Shadi constantly reminds us to be grateful for our lives and for our family.

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About Josh

Top 5 Things I love about Josh: (by Shadi)

1) He’s loving
2) He’s really funny
3) He’s supportive
4) He’s brilliant
5) He’s a really good dad

We met during our first year of law school and it was love at first sight. I instantly knew he was different, and quickly discovered he was everything I had wished for in a partner. Josh has such a great energy about him and we instantly became inseparable. We are just the right amount alike and the right amount different. We have pretty similar views on everything important and we love to explore new things and places together. We balance each other out really well as he likes to be more of an observer in social situations, whereas I’m outgoing and like to socialize as much as possible.

Josh is definitely an “old soul” in that he’s comfortable in his own skin and exudes confidence and assurance. He always makes me feel like I’m safe and that everything is going to work out. He doesn’t sweat the small stuff, so his outlook has a very calming and assuring effect on me and on Dani. He works hard to provide for our every need and takes very good care of us. Watching him with our 8-year-old daughter Dani is heart-warming (and often hilarious) because he plays with her as if he’s entertained children his whole life. He takes on imaginary personas to entertain her (fake accents and all) and she gobbles it up. He’s definitely the “fun one” and she can’t get enough of his tickles and hugs. He’s so effortless with her…fatherhood suits him so well.

I always say that marrying Josh was the best thing I ever did because he truly is my everything and because without him, all the good wouldn’t exist. He gave me Dani and we have built a beautiful life together. I don’t ever want to imagine a life without him in it.

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Why We Are Choosing to Adopt

The desire to adopt a child was one of the wishes we had in common long before we were married. We waited to start a family until we had met some self-imposed requirements with respect to emotional readiness, good health, and financial stability. Although we were blessed with our biological daughter in 2015, our desire to add to our tribe through adoption has only grown stronger. Having our daughter Daniella has enhanced our mental and emotional commitment to adoption. We knew before Daniella, and know better now, that raising a child is an immense responsibility. The obligation of preparedness with regard to someone else’s biological child imposes a far greater responsibility, one we are more than ready for.

Having Daniella has made us good parents and has instilled the patience that comes with having raised children. She has increased our capacity for empathy and has grown our affection for all children. So while we always wanted to adopt, our desire and preparedness for adoption has increased exponentially since the birth of our daughter. Our daughter Daniella is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her little brother or sister and often daydreams out loud about the fun things they’ll do together. As beautiful as our current family dynamic feels, we know that we have a lot of love to give and that we really want another child to love and care for.

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Our Lifestyle

We have worked very hard to find a beautiful balance between work and home life. We both work from home which gives us a lot of flexibility with our schedules and our activities. We love to spend time together as a couple and as a family, with our daughter Daniella.

We both love to cook and to bake and we enjoy making delicious homecooked meals. As a family, we love to put puzzles together, play board games, watch movies together, play at the park, swim at the beach, ride our bikes along the beach, walk to downtown to get dinner and ice cream, host playdates with other families we love, and take trips to explore new places.

Our daughter Daniella is eight years old and loves going to school and hanging with her friends. Her after school activities include playing tennis, learning piano, taking swim lessons, art classes, and voice lessons. We have learned a lot about patience and managing our expectations around the learning process, knowledge that will greatly benefit our second child.

We have a 4th family member, a long-haired dachshund named Coco, who we absolutely adore. To us, dogs are to be squished and cuddled, vigorously. We believe they can teach children responsibility, unconditional love, caring, and help them learn that animals have a need for love and friendship just like humans do. Our pup travels with us and provides us all with epic snuggles and endless laughter.

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Home and Neighborhood

We live in a quaint neighborhood with a charming downtown full of good food, delicious bakeries, great shopping, bookstores, smoothie shops, and an ice cream shop that is a local favorite.

People from all around come to our area for summer festivals where the downtown is closed to traffic, and vendors from all over the city come to sell delicious goodies and artistic creations. It is also a magnet for families at Halloween and at Christmas.

On Halloween during the day, kids in costume from all over, come and walk the downtown in a gigantic line of thousands of people trick or treating at all of the local shops. At night they walk the neighborhoods, as it is one of the local hot spots for decorations, and the candy companies are grateful as kids from neighborhoods near and far come to collect bags full of sweets. At Christmas, the downtown and the neighborhoods are similarly enthusiastic and draw consistent streams of people to see the decorations lit up at night.

The weather is nice most of the year and we love to spend time outdoors. We live just a few blocks from the beach and enjoy taking walks along the ocean and having picnics at the beach.

Our neighborhood is filled with old tree-lined streets with beautiful and charming homes. Our neighbors are all people that are raising or have raised families. They are supportive, respectful, and come from a variety of experiences and backgrounds. We try and keep a healthy and happy home alongside others that value the same qualities.

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Our Families

We live in Southern California, just a few blocks from the beach. Shadi grew up in California and has friends from every stage of her life in the area. Shadi’s family is Persian and embraces a warm culture that loves to celebrate. Her network of friends and family is large and comes together for gatherings of family and friends frequently. Their lives revolve around food, music, dancing, game nights, and lively conversation. Dani thrives in this environment. Most of the Persians currently in the US immigrated in the late 70s and early 80s. They understand the challenges associated with integrating into a community and are welcoming and empathetic to others that are faced with similar challenges. Shadi has a younger brother she is close to, and two cousins and more extended family that live very close and we enjoy spending time together.

Josh’s family lives primarily in or around Denver, Colorado. His mother and father are divorced and both are remarried, which has had the effect of growing the family significantly on his father’s side. He now has two step-brothers and a step-sister, each married with multiple children. Josh’s sister is married and has one son. They all live in Denver and we visit once a year and spend a lot of time outdoors in the mountains, come together for big dinners, or, when visiting Josh’s mom, a lot of time is spent baking, immediately eating what we baked, and then repeating the process.

Josh’s sister along with friends of his step-brother have experience with adoption. Josh’s sister is a birth mother, and his step-brother’s good friends are adoptive parents twice over. These experiences have helped our family view adoption as a beautiful way to grow our family and as a way to enhance family bonds.

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Family Traditions

We definitely go all out for the holidays. We are like the Griswolds during Christmas, without the chaos. Christmas festivities at our home and throughout our extended family are filled with homemade goodies and decorated trees and mantles. When visiting Josh’s parents for Christmas, our family comes together to cut down a tree that we then decorate with Grandma’s handmade ornaments. We spend the days gathered around the fireplace watching Christmas movies and eating baked goods.

When not visiting with family, we like to travel to various Christmas markets to take in the holiday cheer and to hunt for unique handmade decorations to add to our collection. Other holidays such as Thanksgiving, Easter and Halloween are celebrated with similar exuberance. We all dress up for Halloween, have huge Thanksgiving dinners, and pay homage to the Easter Bunny with egg hunts and delicious meals. Experiencing the holidays through the eyes of a child makes it a wonderful experience and worth all of the effort.

In addition to celebrations, we love to travel to new places and we and believe that it instills a greater tolerance and understanding of other cultures through gaining different perspectives. Between Shadi and Josh, our family has seen a great deal of this world and intend to keep exploring. One of our favorite places to visit is Hawaii, where we eat large Hawaiian style breakfasts while spending the rest of the day swimming them off. It’s hard to beat this type of getaway with kids and we plan to revisit this vacation for years to come.

But the biggest “holiday” of all is Dani’s birthday and we love to make a big deal about it every year. We truly enjoy throwing full-blown “Pinterest-type” themed birthday extravaganzas. Our daughter is 8 years old and each of her birthday parties has centered around a different theme complete with ponies, face painters, balloon twisters, scavenger hunts, jumpy houses, elaborate decorations and custom cakes. We are overjoyed at the thought of having a second child that we can celebrate with the same level of enthusiasm and creativity!

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Cultural Diversity

We are a diverse couple and we love discovering and learning about other cultures and the traditions that make them unique. We enjoy eating and love to explore the food from other cultures and regions. We love to travel and, we think it is one of the best ways to experience cultural diversity first hand. It is also a great teaching moment for many different lessons, including how to recognize and respect local customs.

We will respect your child’s race, ethnicity, and culture and plan to celebrate their background and heritage, and find connections to local communities for direct interaction. We want them to be confident, proud, and respectful members of society and we want to instill a love for where they come from. We feel that honoring their race and their heritage, and connecting with a community of individuals with the same background will be a useful tool for their future.

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What Adoption Means to Us

We are approaching the adoption process with a different set of skills than other hopeful families, in that we already have a daughter that we love immensely. We are so lucky to already know the joy of having a child and have experienced the flow of emotions that arise when you realize that this helpless little angel relies on you for everything, and that you become their whole world. We love that feeling and the responsibility that comes with it, as it has changed our lives for the better in every way.

For us, it doesn’t matter that your child isn’t ours biologically. We believe that an adopted child will enrich our lives in untold ways and make us stronger and more complete as a family. Our hearts are filled with the same excitement now as they were when Shadi first discovered she was pregnant. It is palpable, and we can’t stop envisioning all the amazing moments to come.

We know that, in life, the more observant you are, the more patience you offer, and the more effort you carefully supply to a relationship in a loving and caring way, the more you will see it pay off in the little humans you care for. This process is the most gratifying in all of life and we can’t wait to shower your child with the abundance of love overflowing in our hearts.

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Our Relationship with You

Over 20 years ago, Josh’s sister placed one of her children for adoption. She has shared that she didn’t know enough about the adopting parents and never felt confirmation that she had made the right decision, as she had no line of communication with the adopted parents and didn’t have the ability to check in on her child’s well-being. Unfortunately, open adoptions were not common back then. Although a closed adoption was a product of the times and the state in which the adoption took place, it was frustrating for her.

We want you to have confidence that you made the right decision in trusting us with your child. We will respect your wishes with regard to the role you would like to serve in our child’s life. Options may include sending you updates of milestones in writing with pictures and/or video clips, or phone conversations, video chats and even physical meetings. We will be open with your child about their adoption, about you, and about your desire for them to have a wonderful life.

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Our Promise to You

First and foremost, we promise to love your child as our own, and to give them all of the love and support in the world. We promise to treat them with as much patience, compassion, and support as the other members of our family, and that we will guide their lives the best we can while respecting them as an individual, with their unique needs and dreams.

We promise that we will cherish the trust you place in us and will always act in what we believe to be the best interests of your child, with the goal that they are happy, loved, comforted and supported so that they can become confident, compassionate, intelligent, and responsible members of society.

We promise that we will be honest with your child about you and your desire to do what you felt was best for them and their future and we will be fair and respectful when considering any desires you may have with respect to playing a role in your child’s life.