Ashley and Christina

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From Us to You

Dear Expectant Mother,

Thank you for considering us as future parents for your child. We promise we will do everything we can to give your child the best care and promise we will love your child unconditionally. We have always believed that adoption was the path that we would take to build our family. We don’t think that family is based on biology but instead is made from a strong bond and commitment between people. We have many in our lives who we consider our family—relatives, friends, and even our pets! You will also be an extended part of our family. Your child will know about you from the first day we meet them. We will tell your child about the immense love that you have for them, and how lucky they are to have a birth mom who was selfless and willing to give us such an incredible gift. If there is anything that you would like us to share with your child (music, a letter, photos, a favorite childhood toy or blanket) we hope you would allow us to share that with them, so they are always reminded of you.

To tell you a little bit about us, we met each other 5 years ago during our medical residency training— we like to say that during the stress of medical training, you really get to see people’s true colors. We found each other to be dependable, kind, and optimistic work colleagues, even in periods of extreme stress. Over time this grew into a more serious relationship. We have been together for almost 4 years now and joke that we are lucky because it feels like we get to be with our best friend every day. We laugh, explore, grow, cook, and have so much fun together. We are thankful for the intense time that medical school and residency brought, as we grew as people, but we are now at a point in our lives where life can slow down and we can begin to build our life outside of work.

Your child will grow up surrounded by the beauty of the mountains, desert, and ocean. We enjoy weekend trips exploring these surrounding areas with our dogs, Ollie and Hugo, and can’t wait for your child to join us on these adventures. As your child gets older (and even when they are younger!) we would like to travel and take them to new places to experience different cultures and diversity of people. We will nurture and support their own interests and passions as they grow and will provide your child with a safe environment where they can be a child-to be free to play, create, make mistakes, and feel protected. Kindness and doing good are very important life lessons that we will teach your child.

Many of our colleagues and family have been blessed by the beauty of adoption.  Ash’s Aunt Annie placed a child for adoption who was raised by a wonderful family in Washington with two siblings that were also adopted.  Ash always remembers how proud her Aunt Annie was of her daughter (she went to college and was a Division 1 athlete!).  Aunt Annie kept in touch with her daughter and exchanged holiday cards every year.  She even went to her daughter’s wedding a few years ago!  It has been a very positive interaction to see.

Although we cannot begin to imagine how you are feeling, we want to acknowledge what an incredible gift you would be giving us and how incredibly happy you would make us. Please let us know if there is anything specific you would like to know about us— we genuinely are open books! We look forward to our future journey together.

All the best,
Christina & Ash

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Why We are Choosing to Adopt

We have incredibly fulfilling lives and are so grateful for this! We have family and friends who are supportive and loving. We have a safe, open home with great natural light and cozy to be in. We live in a diverse area, where there is always something to see and do. We trained for many years to become doctors and now work in academic positions, where we find great meaning in teaching and caring for patients. Our family also includes our dogs, Ollie and Hugo, who are very loveable German Shepherds with a lot of spunk and who loves children! Individually, we always knew that we wanted to adopt rather than have biological children. Our lives and hearts have room for more people and we would like nothing more than to raise a child, watch them grow, and support them through their lives.

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About Ashley, by Christina

Ashley is humble, reliable, kind, and non-judgmental. She sees the best in other people and helps those she interacts with, whether they are her friends, family, strangers, or patients. Ashley finds it very important to give back to others— she grew up in a small town and is thankful for all of the people who helped her along the way to learn more about the world. She maintains friendships from across her life— and always has friends to visit when we travel or are visiting her when we are at home. People love being around Ashley! She is the most loyal friend, calm, fun, and easy to talk to. She volunteers a lot of her time teaching medical students, and residents and is also very involved with a local free clinic.  Ashley is super level-headed and unflappable—she does not get easily stressed by hectic situations. Her optimism is unending, and she consistently looks for the silver lining. Ashley has always loved animals since she was a child, and as an adult, she enjoys training German Shepherds. Ashley is very smart and accomplished, but she is the most humble person you could ever meet. When you meet Ashley, you will feel at ease.

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About Christina, by Ashley

Christina is nurturing, fun, and the kindest person that you could ever meet. She loves children and animals, and they absolutely love her back. She is the oldest child in her family and calls her mom (who lives alone) every day to make sure that she is doing okay. She is a self-proclaimed introvert but people love being around Christina, and we always have friends and family coming by our house for a home-cooked meal or just to chat with Christina about what’s going on in their lives. She is a great listener and her empathy makes her magnetic to other people. Christina is creative and loves to express herself through cooking and crafting—she finds these activities relaxing and it gives her alone time to reset from work–she recently made a collection of nudibranchs (sea slugs). Last year she created a fairy garden that lives hidden near our front porch. She is very driven, smart, and motivated having been the first person in her family to go to college, and then after that, she completed medical school. Although she is well accomplished, she is incredibly humble and downplays all of her many accomplishments. When you meet Christina, you will feel like she is someone that you have known for a long time.

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Lifestyle

Overall, our lifestyle is a balance of work, home life, friends/family, and some travel. We are both doctors so we keep busy during the week and lead extroverted lives, seeing patients, doing research, and teaching. We also enjoy volunteering at a free clinic in the area. We find much meaning in the work that we do for patients and students we interact with. However, when not at work, we enjoy the comforts of our home and having friends and family over.

Much of our favorite time is spent during the weekends, walking around the neighborhood, going on hikes, getting cozy by the fire in our living room with hot tea and watching a good movie or doing a puzzle, and enjoying the backyard with our dogs, Ollie and Hugo. We love to cook (as well as bake!) and host – our friends and family frequently visit and drop in. These are all things we will do with your child – teach them to bake bread and decorate sugar cookies, and let them choose recipes they want to try (we already have a children’s cookbook called “Kid in the Kitchen” if cooking is something they become interested in). We also love being out in nature, as we live in a beautiful area that has accessibility to the mountains, beach, and desert within just a 1-2 hour drive.

When we have vacation time, we like to plan local trips to different areas as well as sometimes travel internationally (we recently went to Ireland). It is very important to us, that your child gets to experience diversity in cultures, locations, and people. We would travel internationally with them but also take them on local hikes and trips to the redwoods and ocean and try to instill in them a desire to give back to the planet. Where we travel, they will travel, and we are excited to show them our favorite locations and explore new locations with them!

We have many friends that have babies and toddlers and look forward to your child becoming friends with them – there will be many play dates! Ashley’s brother and his wife Julie are also looking to start a family and we’re excited to be a part of their process. While we do lead busy work schedules, we are very fortunate to have some flexibility in our hours and plan to alternate work-from-home days to optimize spending time with your child. Additionally, Christina’s mom will likely move to the area to play a large role in childcare and, if we need additional support, we are fortunate to have very close friends who have some amazing nannies (many of whom are multilingual) they’d be willing to share with us.

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Home & Neighborhood

We live in a quaint home built in the 1940s, in a historic neighborhood. We bought this home last year and have spent time decorating and renovating it. Our home has a lot of natural light and large windows, which is one of our favorite parts. We imagine Christmas baking sessions in the kitchen with your child and painting and crafting (with lots of glitter glue!) at the table. We have a backyard with a lot of privacy (filled with trees along the fences), which our dogs love to play in. We plan to add a sandbox in the backyard (digging for dinosaur fossils in the sand is a must) and imagine your child using our backyard as a place they can play and dream and learn. We have been growing succulents in our backyard and enjoy decorating our front yard for the holidays. We have a very family oriented neighborhood and all the holiday seasons are filled with neighborhood house-decorating contests, social events, and concerts.

Our home is a quick 5 minute drive to restaurants, vintage shops, and a local college. Our neighborhood has many mature trees and we enjoy walking our dogs around the neighborhood. We will pack up the stroller and take your child to the nearby parks to meet other children their age and to the community garden, where they can learn about growing vegetables and flowers. We live in a diverse neighborhood and know our neighbors and their families, some of whom are young couples and others who are multi-generational families. We love our home and our community!

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Our Hobbies

We enjoy spending time with our pets, as we are both huge animal lovers! Our oldest dog is Ollie, a 3-year-old German Shepherd who loves to play! We adopted her brother Hugo, a 2-year-old German Shepherd, this past winter. He is a cuddle-bug and very relaxed. They love spending time with our friends and family (and their pet friends, two kittens who we are fostering, Mochi and Dixon!) and playing with kids who are energetic, just like them. We spend a lot of time walking with the dogs around the neighborhood, playing with them in our backyard, and going to the dog beach and regional park. We live in an area with lots of vintage/antique shops, and we love to walk into the shops and look around. Christina likes to cook and craft— she makes small clay figurines whenever she has time! Ashley enjoys learning about historic homes and neighborhoods and taking care of the pets.

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Education

Growing up, our parents emphasized the importance of education. Christina’s parents and Ashley’s mom did not go to college. Ashley’s dad graduated from college after his children were born— before this, he worked as a carpet cleaner. Because our parents did not have college educations when we were children, they saw education as something that could open doors for their children and hoped to give us opportunities they may have not had. We were both expected to go to college and we learned to work hard to achieve our educational goals. We both graduated from four-year universities with degrees in molecular biology and psychology. Because of our upbringings and life experiences we each decided to apply to medical school. After medical school, we each completed our intern year/residency, and ultimately became dermatologists. We continue to see the value of education, and both work at university centers where we take care of patients, but are also given the opportunity to give back and teach college students, medical students, and residents/fellows. We love teaching and value education— it has opened up many doors and introduced us to many people and experiences.

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Our Families & Friends

We love our family and friends! We are lucky to have very supportive families and a tight-knit friend group. Our family is very excited about our adoption journey and they will be ecstatic to meet your baby, as this will be their first grandchild (they have been waiting excitedly for their first grandchild!).

Christina’s mom works for a non-profit organization that supports people with disabilities, teaching them skills and connecting people with job opportunities. She visits us frequently and we enjoy going up the coast to visit her. We recently all went on a trip to Ireland together. She is always sending fun and/or helpful things in the mail! Christina has two younger siblings, Amanda and Adam who are currently in Texas and Washington DC, respectively, getting advanced degrees in medicine and math. Their family loves going to Disneyland together, and we have an upcoming trip planned (we can’t wait to take your child on Peter Pan and Small World rides for the first time at Disneyland).

Ash’s family lives in Idaho where she grew up. Her dad and brother are both high school math teachers and her mom Angie recently retired from working at a potato processing factory after about 20 years of work. Her family enjoys Face-timing, family trips, and visiting us when they can. Both of our families are hard-working, down-to-earth, kind people who would do anything to help others. They will probably visit even more frequently once they have a grandchild (and Christina’s mom will likely move to the area).

We have a lot of friends in the area, many are doctors, nurses, and medical assistants, who we met during training or at work. We also have many friends from high school, college, and medical school, that no longer live near us, but who we enjoy visiting when we’re nearby. Our closest friends come from diverse racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds. We are bonded by the idea of making the world a better, more inclusive place.

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Racial & Cultural Diversity

We are both physicians and because of our diverse patient populations and colleagues, we already work in a diverse community. It is very important to us that our family is part of a racial and culturally diverse and accepting community. We feel lucky to live in an area that has exposure to many different people and ways of life. We plan to have your child experience diversity through our community, but also through our close friends who span many different racial and cultural backgrounds. We have learned and experienced so much from our friends who have different backgrounds than our own. For example, some of our closest friends are from Mexico. Dante and Antonio grew up in Mexico and we frequently go on trips together where they teach us about different foods, how to improve our Spanish and introduce us to new places. Antonio’s wife Jessie is Chinese and she teaches us about different foods and celebrations – we recently celebrated Chinese New Year with her and her mom. Our friends like food as much as we do and often introduce us to cultures through food – Melissa is Filipino and makes delicious pancit guisado, while Hana brings homemade tabbouleh regularly. Through our friends, we have been introduced to several multicultural holiday celebrations including Hannukah, Diwali, and Ramadan. Additionally, we plan to live in a diverse school district so your child can interact with a variety of people daily and gain close friends with people of many different backgrounds.

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Family Traditions

While we’ve had certain traditions for years, we are always open to new traditions and new ideas for existing traditions. We would love to share traditions you grew up with that you’d like your child to experience. Most of our traditions center around seeing family for the holidays and going on trips with family. We plan a trip with each of our families yearly and try to squeeze in an annual camping trip. During our annual camping trip, we disconnect from our emails and phones and spend time with family in nature. Some of us prefer a cabin to tent camping, which is okay! Everyone gets to choose. We all find a way to stay at the same campsite and spend time outdoors, cook over a campfire together, go to the river, hike, and make s’mores. We can’t wait for your child to listen and share stories around the campfire, play with hot wheels on the tarp outside the tent, and enjoy the sticky goo of roasted marshmallows. On our recent family trip to Ireland, we stayed at a quaint bed and breakfast and enjoyed exploring the city, eating lots of good food, and having afternoon tea.

We also love to decorate our house for the holidays, both inside and out! We enjoy carving pumpkins for Halloween and baking cookies every Christmas – things we hope your child will love as well! We gift our cookies to friends and neighbors and compete in our works’ holiday competitions (most recently we won 2^nd place for our mummy cupcakes during a Halloween baking championship at Ash’s work!). We recently tried to make moon cakes for the lunar new year (work in progress!). Ashley’s family loves to play Fantasy Football so each year her family drafts their respective teams (Ash’s team is called Nala Bears after her first German Shepherd).

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What We will Share

We plan to tell your child from the first day that we meet them that their birth mother loved them more than anything — so much that you wanted to give them the best opportunities in life. We will share with them as much as you would like us to, so that your child has answers to questions about where they came from and that you shared them with us out of immense love. When they are small, we plan to have a picture book talking about this that we will read to them, and anything that you might be willing to share with us (a letter, your favorite song, an object you’d like them to have) we would like to share with them as well.

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Our Promise to You

We promise to make your child’s health and well-being our top priority.  We will nurture empathy, compassion, and reliability. We will support them to be their authentic, best self in whatever form that takes. They can find sanctuary at home and in us, and we promise to help them navigate this complex world. We promise to remind them of you, what you gave our family, and your unconditional love. We promise to be present and build a life that will support their hopes and dreams.