We enjoy continually improving on our house, which we renovated together in 2015, and the land surrounding the house. We raise chickens and quail (for the eggs only), Gina grows vegetables and herbs, and Jacob is starting beekeeping this year. We like to build things with wood, usually out of necessity for all of the homesteading projects, such as the chicken coops and garden beds, but Gina has also built her own office furniture. We are active in the Delaware Beekeepers Association and at the Delaware State Fair. When not performing music or jamming at home, we attend local concerts and festivals.

Our homesteading lifestyle is focused around building healthy relationships, having a healthy body and mind, working hard, thinking well, and feeling positive about life. We are grateful to have the stability and resources to live the homesteading life and have also worked hard to maintain it. We take pride in doing as much for ourselves as we can, and relying on the local community for things we cannot do. We keep ourselves happy and healthy by always communicating openly and honestly and not being afraid to tackle problems head-on when it is needed.

We have a lot of hobbies, and creativity is very important to both of us. Between the two of us, there isn't much we won't try at least once. Together, we play and record music in our home studio. We play live gigs during the summer with our band that we have been in for 15 years.

We both love to read and are regular patrons of the library and used bookstores. Our local library has excellent children's programs which are growing every year. We read science, philosophy, history, religion, psychology, politics, classic fiction, fairy tales, Arthurian legend, and world mythologies.

Together we like to ride bikes, hike, and exercise. We also love cooking and baking. We make bread, pizza dough, bagels, sushi rolls, tacos, curry, and more. A yearly tradition is making over 50 jars of tomato sauce from our own garden. Teaching a child to love food, gardening, and cooking is a great joy!

Gina also loves to sew. She makes most of our clothes and volunteers in the local community teaching a therapeutic sewing workshop to men and women who have experienced trauma. Gina looks forward to someday making baby and children's clothes and sharing with a child her many creative hobbies.

Jacob's ethnic background is from India, where both of his parents were born, and he was exposed to a range of Indian, Pakistani, and Middle Eastern cultures and religious beliefs growing up. We enjoy cooking Indian food and including other connections to India into our home. Family gatherings with Jacob's multi-racial extended family always provide us with new and fun ways to celebrate our connection to his Indian heritage.

We have both traveled to explore other parts of the world, including Argentina, Australia, Tanzania, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and more. We enjoy finding ways to learn from other cultures and bring new traditions into our home.

Our extended network of friends and family is multi-racial and welcoming to people from all backgrounds. Our professional network of scientists is also incredibly diverse, hailing from many different countries. Our scientist friends are passionate about connecting children of different backgrounds through common interests in science.

As an inter-racial couple, we always find ways to celebrate our differences and value everybody equally. We are excited to bring a child into our family and our communities.

Our community in Kent County, Delaware is a family-oriented county with plenty of activities for children and adults. The Delaware Art League holds community art classes. The agricultural community is very active with beekeeping, livestock, 4H, scouts, gardening, crafting, environmental and ecology activities, and more that all culminate each year at the Delaware State Fair.

The community also has the typical suburban amenities like grocery stores, shopping centers, and restaurants between 10-30 minutes away. There are parks, museums, lakes, beaches, and campgrounds all nearby or within an hour drive.

We live on a 6-acre rural property – our "neighbors" to each side and to the back are the Delaware State Wildlife Area. Our neighbors across the street have a farm with young children and most of the surrounding neighborhoods have families with children.

Our house is a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom brick rancher with one finished level and a full, but unfinished, basement. We use the basement for indoor plant growing, food storage, and projects. The living room is wide open and perfect for a playroom, exercise room, and entertainment room. The child will have their choice of two different bedrooms as they grow up. Our property offers ~5 acres of woods for them to play in, along with 5 garden beds, two chicken coops, a quail pen, a stream, and a front and backyard.

Our extended family members who we see the most often are Jacob's dad, stepmother Judy, his aunt Anju and his uncle Ninu. When we get together we love to cook and share our favorite recipes! Cooking is a huge part of our family tradition. Jacob's dad is a part time personal chef and Anju is an excellent cook and makes dishes from around the world that she and Ninu learn from their world travels.

Gina's family lives in Florida and we visit them once or twice a year. Gina is close to her mom and they love sewing and art. Gina's brother Mark and his wife Sam have one son named Axel and maybe more on the way! Gina's other nearby family include her aunt Bonnie and uncle Jim, their three grown children, and seven grandchildren between ages 5-14, who all live within 4 hours driving distance. We see them at the family beach gathering every year.

Some of our favorite people have what we call a Big Story - those things in life that didn't go as planned and end up changing you forever. We each have our own Big Stories, and we have been fortunate that our paths have crossed with others working their way through their own stories. Out of these people, we have built our family of choice.

We met fifteen years ago in Port Matilda, Pennsylvania at band practice. All of the band members were strangers who met through musician-wanted ads. We had no idea at the time that this band would become a second family to us. We married in 2012, and three families came to celebrate: our biological families and our music family. We've known for years that family is more than DNA. Back when we were dating, we revealed that we had each seen ourselves as someday becoming adoptive parents. We moved to Delaware in 2015 to branch out into a more diverse community and start our hobby farm, where we live today.

If you're reading this, you are probably working through your own Big Story, and your child is about to begin theirs. Parts of the story may hurt - even a lot - but they don't mean the person experiencing them is broken or bad. They mean you have lived life. They make you a complex and interesting person, capable of receiving the gift of making deep emotional connections with others. These experiences, painful as they may have been, can become superpowers.

There are a lot of times when we've looked back at our own lives and thought we could have done without some of the more difficult lessons. Maybe we could have learned them in less painful ways? But none of us will ever know these alternate futures. What matters is what's happening now.

If you choose us as your child's family, we understand the gravity of this decision. Your child (and you!) will be welcomed into a huge network of both biological and chosen family who are just about the most empathetic, accepting, and open-minded people we've ever known. Our community has been with us through some really difficult times and we only came out stronger in the end.

Education is very important to us, but what is even more important is thriving. As scientists, we have both spent much of our adult lives in universities, but we've been fortunate to also spent at least half of our time on music. These two worlds have blessed us with a balanced perspective. A good education can certainly be a path to thriving, and we plan to give any child who grows up in our home the ability to receive an excellent education. But what we feel is most important for children is a safe, loving, and supportive home, with strong family traditions and opportunities for creative self-expression. We hope to offer them the right balance of structure and freedom to nurture them into a happy, healthy human.

Neither of us can claim to fully understand the difficult choice you are facing. We are so grateful that you are considering us as your child's family. We want you know that by placing your child into our family, you become family as well. We will be sure to send photos, videos, and updates as they grow. We are also open to arranging phone or video calls, and if geographically possible, in-person visits at a pace that we agree works for both of us.

Your child will never have to feel out of place with us, with multiple adopted cousins and blended families in our diverse social circle. We have found that as we tell even random strangers about our decision to adopt, people will exclaim, "So cool! I'm adopted!" or "My child is adopted!" giving us even more confidence that your child will be welcomed into our community and will find people who understand them.

Thank you again for allowing us the chance to share our heart with you.

Sincerely,

Jacob & Gina