Dear Birthmother,

Thank you for reading our letter and getting to know us better! 

We are Joel and Sheridan and we have made our home in the San Francisco Bay Area where we enjoy the wonder of life and not its limitations.  Joel can’t wait to be a dad and Sheridan is looking forward to being a stay at home mom.  We have been married for 2 ½ years and together for 8.  We have been ready for some time to grow our family and are excited and committed to do so through adoption.

We know adoption can be a wonderful experience because Joel has an adopted, younger brother Ryan who we are close to and lives only a couple of blocks away from our home.  We consider it an advantage that our child will grow up having an uncle who shares the experience of adoption. 

We have so much love that we are ready to share with a child.  We are humbled and excited to share this journey with you.

Sheridan & Joel

ABOUT US

We met on New Year’s Eve in New York City eight years ago.  Sheridan had just performed in a stand-up comedy show in Times Square and went to a party afterwards where mutual friends arranged the “set-up”.  Our friends knew that we were both shy so they told us each separately that the other one really liked them. What a great idea!  It worked to make us each more relaxed and confident and we immediately connected.  Getting to know each other was easy and as the relationship developed, we kept finding out more and more things that we had in common, like we both have parents that were hippies in the 70’s.  We lived in New York City until 2012 before moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area to be closer to Joel’s family.  We now live in Richmond in a great neighborhood called the North and East, one block away from a park - Solano Playlot – that is popular with the kids.

We both love architecture, art and cities. We enjoy exploring neighborhoods on foot or on bikes looking for new shops, farmers markets or taking pictures of things we find interesting.  Just last week in an antique store we saw a really great vintage light fixture that looks like a helicopter that we would love to get for our child’s nursery/bedroom.  We also like watching stand-up comedy and funny movies, often curling up on the sofa and laughing until it’s time for bed.  It will be so much fun to explore a new genre, picking out silly ‘kid’s’ movies and watching them together as a family.  We also love dinner parties and cooking.  Sheridan is on a Gluten Free diet so we are always inviting friends and family over to ‘test out’ new recipes with us.  We try to eat healthy organic food, though, considering Sheridan grew up in Texas, it is nearly impossible for us to be vegetarians - Ha!

Joel is an architect and an artist. He is involved in making communities beautiful and livable.  He also volunteers at our local park the Solano Playlot, doing everything from designing a new entry kiosk to helping landscape the park.  We also volunteer for the spring and fall festivals held at the park, and we are hoping that next year Joel can dress up in a bunny costume to escort our child to the great, big Easter egg hunt. 

Sheridan works in the interior design field, spending most of her workday meeting with designers and architects (like Joel!) and talking to them about the design materials that her company makes.  She also performs stand-up comedy.  She loves to write funny jokes and she loves to speak in front of people. We laugh a lot!

SHERIDAN (by Joel)

Sheridan is the most caring, loving, compassionate, funny and entertaining person that I have ever known.

Sheridan is a great supporter of family.  She is very close with her sister and they talk daily.  Sheridan is always thinking of family members and how they might need help.  She has welcomed my family into hers with open arms.  She sometimes visits my uncle and aunt, who live up the street, when I am not home and talks with my mother on a regular basis. She cares so much about animals too.  She takes silly pictures of birds and squirrels at parks. She is always sending these to me in texts.  She really loves our cats and makes sure that they are happy.

I have always been amazed at Sheridan’s ability to perform stand-up comedy.  It is not easy to get up in front of a crowd and try to make them laugh.  She has the courage and tenacity to get up there over and over again. When everything goes right, her shows are amazing.  The bigger the crowd, the better she does.

When not on stage, she makes me laugh every day more times than I can count.  We have a very close relationship and speak to each other many times throughout the day. Every morning we have a cup of coffee together before I take off for work.  I often call her on my way home for a good laugh.  Not only will Sheridan love our child deeply, but she will bring our child so much joy, smiles and giggles.

JOEL (by Sheridan)

Joel is the most creative, insightful, grounded, gentle man I know.  Everywhere we go, babies, dogs and cats end up in his lap.

Joel is so supportive of me. I love that he’s so supportive of my stand-up comedy.  On one of our first dates Joel came to a comedy show where I was performing and he made me feel so comfortable on stage.  I looked over and saw him laughing and smiling and I felt a strong connection - I could tell in that moment that he was a keeper!

Joel is one of those men who doesn’t brag or offer his opinion on every topic but when you ask him something, he has brilliant, thoughtful, studied insight.  He also loves to get involved with community organizations and offers his architectural knowledge to improve our city.  Joel likes to build stuff for our house.  In a single afternoon he built a new and modern platform for our bed.  Even though he could relax knowing that he’s such a great architect, he never wants to stop learning.  He is always looking at how to build things better and using fewer resources.  Right now he’s working on making the perfect cat house out of recycled samples because our kitty insists on sleeping some nights outside.

I can already see Joel teaching our child how to work with tools and build birdhouses out of milk cartons and other found items.  Joel also loves to garden and I picture him talking with our child about what flowers and vegetables they want to plant together.  We have a big back yard so there’s plenty of space to plant veggies and flowers and still have room to play and run around in the grass.  Our child will be lucky to have such a fun and cool dad!

FAMILY

We’re so lucky to have family in the Bay Area, including Joel’s mom, Sheridan’s sister and her family, as well as Joel’s younger, adopted brother Ryan who lives around the corner from us! We also have family in Denver and Texas. We all get together for big Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners (this Christmas everyone is going to Santa Fe), and there are many future aunts, uncles and grand-mothers (with great taste in gifts and clothing) waiting to shower our baby  with fashionable unpretentious clothes (read: “New York meets San Francisco”, understated with a splash of color-no spandex) – ha!

HOME & COMMUNITY

We have a happy home with a big back yard.  Even though we have only lived here for two years, it has a lot of happy family memories already since it was the same house that Joel lived in when he was a teenager.  When Joel’s parents moved to Berkeley, we decided to purchase it to continue the happy family memories and build some new ones with our own child.

We have two great kitties.  Maya came from the Berkeley pound and then Bison (the fluffy cat) came to our back window and touched the window pane with his paw as if to say “you complete me”.  He knows how to work a room and he does a “double roll over circus move” so we obviously had no choice but to add him to our family.

We love our close-knit neighborhood.  There are many young families in the neighborhood, and we are close friends with many of our neighbors.  We go to our neighbors for Halloween and we have a party where all of the adults dress in costumes and take turns going to the door when trick-or-treaters come.  Joel usually dresses up as Frankenstein since he’s 6’-5” (he looks so cute with bolts glued to his neck) and we’re already thinking of fun Halloween costumes for our child.  We’re part of a very tight knit community so our child will have tons of cool grown-ups and kids to play with.

RAISING OUR CHILD & OPEN ADOPTION

We are ready to give a child our love.  Sheridan will be able to devote all of her time to our child since she will be a stay at home mom.  We will give our son the luxury to be sensitive while he grows up and raise him to have an open heart as a strong young powerful boy and then a man.  Someone who can be a best friend to his friends and a sensitive companion for female friends.  We would give our daughter the strength, love and power to express herself in this world. We would give her lessons in the joy of creativity, music and nature.  Joel will teach our child how to draw, play music and tend to nature; Sheridan will teach him or her about people, how to laugh and be silly.  Our child will explore life with us, learn about different cultures, be around animals and have wonderful life experiences.

For a number of years we have been talking and thinking about starting a family.  When we were unable to conceive a child, it was easy for us to decide on adoption because of Joel’s positive personal experience with adoption.  Joel’s brother, Ryan, was adopted.  Joel was fourteen and Ryan was four when Ryan joined the family.  Joel can still remember how exciting it was that first day Ryan came home.  Joel and Ryan have been able to build a wonderful relationship over the years and are great brothers to each other today.  Recently Joel helped Ryan pack everything into a big van and drive 10 hours (with Ryan’s new puppy sleeping on the console between them!) back home to Richmond, California.  Ryan now lives only a few blocks away from our house. We are grateful that our child will share a special adoption connection with uncle Ryan.  We also love the idea of our child having a connection to his or her birth family (you!) and we especially realize the importance since Ryan did not have this experience.  We are so excited to honor a child and build our life around him or her and we welcome you into our lives with open arms.

CONCLUSION

Thank you for taking the time to get to know us!  We eagerly await the dream of little adorable feet running around our happy home! Please let us know if you feel that we would be a good match for your little angel.  We look forward to hearing from you!

If you would like to contact us directly, call us, at 510-621-3379, or email us at [email protected].  You may also call Adoption Connection, at 1-800-972-9225, text only 1-415-355-4636 or email them at [email protected].

With Love and Gratitude,

Joel & Sheridan