Letter
Introduction
"It is our sincere hope that your heart will feel a connection to our family, believing that your child will be loved and nurtured if you allow us the opportunity to raise them."
Nicole, Jamal, and India
Thank you for taking the time to get to know us. We know you are not making your decision lightly and recognize the level of strength and bravery it takes to go through this process. We pray you are surrounded with love and unconditional support to help guide you through every decision. As you look through our profile, we hope you are able to learn about our interests, our personalities, and can feel the level of love that surrounds our lives.
It is our sincere hope that your heart will feel a connection to our family, believing that your child will be loved and nurtured if you allow us the opportunity to raise them. We are a family that believes in supporting each other and being willing to acknowledge if we’ve made a mistake, even as a parent. We also believe in tackling our fears, life-long learning, and helping those in need. Thank you, again, for taking the time to read our profile. Know that we pray for you and your family every day.
It is our sincere hope that your heart will feel a connection to our family, believing that your child will be loved and nurtured if you allow us the opportunity to raise them. We are a family that believes in supporting each other and being willing to acknowledge if we’ve made a mistake, even as a parent. We also believe in tackling our fears, life-long learning, and helping those in need. Thank you, again, for taking the time to read our profile. Know that we pray for you and your family every day.
Why Adoption
"We took time to ensure we were in the best possible position emotionally, spiritually, financially, and support-wise prior to moving forward with our desire to adopt."
Nicole, Jamal, and India on a boat.
Adoption has always been part of our plans. Our early desire was to have 1-2 children of our own and also welcome a child into our family via adoption. We had trouble conceiving and ultimately experienced two miscarriages. Thankfully, we were connected to an amazing high-risk doctor who also worked with a top fertility specialist. With the support of that phenomenal medical partnership and our village of family and friends, we were blessed with the arrival of our rainbow baby, India in 2010. Our family and friends, who we call “Framily”, have rallied around us and her every day since. We took time to ensure we were in the best possible position emotionally, spiritually, financially, and support-wise prior to moving forward with our desire to adopt. The desire never left our hearts and we continued doing research and gathering information from our Framily members who had already taken their journey down the adoption road. Once we were comfortable and involved India in our discussions, we were excited to get a recommendation about Gladney. We were nervous when the pandemic started, but our touch points with Gladney personnel quickly eliminated those fears.
Our Story
"Our relationship is one of mutual respect, love, and daily challenges to be our very best versions of each other."
Nicole and Jamal
Our story began at a small private university in New Orleans, Louisiana. We were both attending undergrad and happened to join the school’s concert choir. We participated in the club for months before we started dating. While we had several common friends, we had never really directly spent anytime together. Just prior to our spring tour, a mutual friend casually introduced us at a party. While on tour in Washington, D.C., tragic news from back home had a major impact on my emotional state and Jamal stepped up to get me through it until my aunt, who lived in the area, was able to comfort me. That was the moment that created a foundation of support that stands strong to this day. We dated for four years, through the end of undergrad and during Jamal’s first year of grad school at SMU. Jamal proposed the year after we graduated undergrad and was married one year later in 2000. We’ve been together for 25yrs, married for 21yrs. Our relationship is one of mutual respect, love, and daily challenges to be our very best versions of each other.
Our Travels
"We have individual and collective hobbies in our household."
Nicole, Jamal, and India at Disneyworld.
We have individual and collective hobbies in our household. Mom loves trying new recipes, taking photos, and recently took up gardening during the pandemic. Dad loves working out, playing VR, and listening to podcasts. India enjoys arts/crafts, reading Erin Hunter series books, playing VR and helping in the kitchen. She also LOVES collecting seashells and interesting mineral rocks. It’s also important that we both have our “thing” with the kiddo. Dad and India took up watching Marvel movies and TV shows together. India and Mom can be found cooking family favorite meals and baking delicious cakes in the kitchen…and sometimes watching funny animated cartoon series on Netflix. We also watch age-appropriate comedy standups together on the regular. We love a good laugh. Don’t know if we sincerely “enjoy” it, but we also took up doing puzzles during the pandemic. That activity has become more of a family lesson in patience and compromise on approach. LOL. To their surprise, Mom got the rest of the family involved in gardening this year. We can be found planting various things around the yard. We do flower beds, flowerpots, gardens, plant a lemon tree, an orange tree, and India also created three patio garden pots for her Grandma’s apartment. We also watch movies together, once we spend a ridiculous amount of time debating the ones, we will all be entertained by. LOL We then grab our blankets, drinks, and popcorn and head to the theater when we plan a movie night. Outside the house, we love traveling. We do road trips and also fly to new places, as our schedules allow. You will see from our profile book that we will end up at the beach at least once a year - that’s mandatory. We each get to select one item for the family to do on each trip. This helps to make sure everyone gets to have something that they are especially excited about. India once selected ziplining when we visited the Virgin Islands.That was quite interesting because Jamal is afraid of heights. He sucked it up and we had a blast.