Introduction
Dear Expectant Parent(s),
Hello, we are Lekha & Hayden. Thank you for taking an interest in our profile and for considering us as part of your adoption plan.
Our Story
Lekha met Hayden in college, and it was love at first sight. Before then, she’d never been interested in dating, but within our first month together, we knew that we wanted to marry each other. A few years later, we did! Since then, we’ve grown together through a mutual love of adventure—making restaurant-quality biscuits, biking all over Massachusetts, and scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef.
Now, we want to plant roots and grow our family. We’ve talked about adoption since we first met, and we bought a home in a neighborhood that’s great for children. Unlike our earlier adventures, we expect parenthood to include more than just the two of us. Our extended family is beyond excited to see a kid in the house. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and we believe that wholeheartedly!
About Lekha
If there’s anyone you want to have your back, it’s Lekha. Lekha will answer your call at 1:00 am or show up to your half marathon with a huge handmade sign while loudly cheering you on. She’s smart, extremely organized, and will happily do your taxes.
Energetic and dedicated, Lekha picks up new hobbies regularly (like baking pies or building a house from scratch!) and always gives them her all. She ran a marathon just a year after starting to run and learned French well enough to speak in France. Nowadays, she’s a regular at the rock-climbing gym, where everyone knows her.
As a kid, Lekha moved a lot—from Illinois to the Caribbean to Texas—so she learned to appreciate the unknown and make friends fast. And she is constantly chasing adventure and making friends. Even the bus drivers know her by name. Lekha has planned 100-person ski trips to Vermont for friends and has gone zip-lining over the rainforest in Costa Rica. She can’t wait to share her love for travel with a child.
Kids love Lekha. She once sat on the floor with our shy baby cousin and tore up paper into “trash” for him to pick up with his toy garbage truck. After that, he said his first words of the night! She tutors at a local elementary school, plays freeze tag with friends’ kids, and dreams about adopting a child.
About Hayden
Hayden is a teacher at heart. He’s taught every age group, including ice skating to kindergarteners. He works as a researcher at a university lab, where he teaches and mentors undergraduate students and creates courses for working professionals about cutting- edge technology. Hayden is beyond passionate about education; he’s even published a book on math for high schoolers. And he helped to raise his brother, changing his diapers and teaching him how to ride a bike.
Hayden is creative. He builds impressive original Lego sculptures! When he and Lekha were long-distance dating, he’d always ask Lekha what she wanted most in the world. Whatever she asked for—a dragonfly, a Venus flytrap, a monster truck—he’d build and bring back for her. The Venus flytrap even closed when you put a finger inside! He loves anime, Pokémon Go, and playing video games. One time, Hayden took the family to a symphony performing music solely from video games. We made bingo boards with the names of games we thought would be performed, and then we marked off the squares during the show. Hayden won!
Hayden’s love language is “acts of service”. He loves to keep the house clean, and whenever we host guests, he makes sure they have fresh bedsheets and homemade waffles for breakfast. Hayden helped his family move across the country, driving 8-hour shifts for multiple days. One year for Christmas, Hayden spent hours making a 100-page recipe book for Mom. When other relatives saw it, they loved it so much that they asked for a copy, too.
Our Home
The first time we stepped inside our home, we knew it was the one. The bedrooms had high ceilings with skylights, and the two kids’ rooms were covered from floor to ceiling in beautiful artwork. Lekha loved the large kitchen counters, which we now use for hosting buffet-style meals, and there’s even an extra room, which we use as a quiet space for reading and indoor gardening.
We love our neighborhood. We live a fifteen-minute walk from everything we need: playgrounds, public swimming pools and ice rinks, our climbing gym, the grocery store, and the local library, which we visit weekly. In the mornings, we often see our friends walking their kids to school, and we get excited about doing the same one day. Then, in the evenings, we use the community path that passes near our house to bike to neighboring towns. For anything further out, public transit picks us up from only a block away.
Our home is the gathering place for our friends and family. People travel from all over the country to celebrate holidays with us. Our living room is open, so people watching TV on the couch can still chat with those cooking dinner in the kitchen. The openness also means we have plenty of room for our growing board game collection, which our nieces and nephews love!
Our Family
Our family is diverse and multicultural. While our roots are important to us, our family is more than just shared ancestry–it’s love, support, and commitment.
We are fortunate to have family all over the country! We alternate major holidays between California and Florida, but we also regularly celebrate a second time with family in the Northeast. A family favorite Christmas game is for each kid (from 4 to 82) to fish for dollar bills using a spatula after being blindfolded and spun around. When we’re in Florida or California, we make sure to sneak in a trip to a Disney park, of course!
Auntie Elena loves to plan vacations with us to different national parks, and Lekha’s mom likes to come up from Texas for the beach in Boston—even in the winter! We spend many weekends with our close friends in Maine, who are excited to be “aunt” and “uncle” to our future kids. Our family friends in central Massachusetts also can’t wait to be “grandparents”. We see them every week to help with home projects and eat dinner together.
Hobbies, Interests, and Traditions
We enjoy celebrating traditions from our different cultural backgrounds, and we love to create new ones together as well.
We cook dinners using recipes passed down for generations, like chicken adobo—the national dish of the Philippines—and stuffed cabbages just the way Hayden’s grandmother made them. Our family’s banana bread recipe has even won a contest! Cooking is often a family event in which everyone plays an important role, and we’re excited to have a little chef join us someday in the kitchen.
Every day, we sit down together on the couch to solve that day’s New York Times crossword puzzle as fast as we can. We’ve done this over 900 days in a row, and we get really excited when we beat our previous best time. Whenever we have friends and family staying over, they jump in to answer clues, too.
Living in New England means we get to enjoy all four seasons. Fall is our favorite. We go apple picking in nearby orchards, make fun Halloween costumes, and carve jack-o-lanterns. Every year, we host a big Friendsgiving where all our friends bring amazing dishes. Then, in the winter, we decorate our Christmas tree with ornaments that we collect whenever we travel somewhere new. In the spring, we celebrate Holi—the Hindu Festival of Colors—and in the summer, we host cookouts and go see the yearly sand sculpture festival at the beach. We can’t wait to share these traditions with a child.
Thank You
Thank you for taking the time to get to know us. We hope we get to meet you, too. We believe that family is made up of the people who understand you, celebrate you, and love you, even without biological ties. We can’t wait to share our lives with a child, and we promise unconditional love from us and a strong support system from our extended family. Whatever future contact you would like to have, we are open to figuring that out together. We know that this is an important decision for you and wish you the best!
Love,