| Father to be | Father to be | |
| First Names | Alex | Jesse |
| Religion | Raised Catholic, converting to Judaism | Jewish |
| Ethnic Background | English/Irish | Ashkenazi Jewish |
| Education/Degree | Law Degree | Bachelors |
| Profession | Public Health Lawyer | Advertising Executive |
Family Video
Our Story
Thanks so much for visiting our page! We are Jesse and Alex, we’re so excited for you to get to know more about us.
We met online in 2011, while we were both living in Philadelphia. The site said we were a 99% match, so we began chatting and planned a date for the next week at a local burger place. Even though we were chatting online, constantly, we were too excited to meet and decided to move our first date up by a few days. We connected instantly over our shared appreciation of a good burger, but soon learned that we had lots more in common - a shared sense of humor, curiosity, strong connections to our families, and warm, notably patient personalities.
We quickly fell in love and enjoyed spending as much time together as possible. We moved in together a year after we started dating, got engaged in 2015, and married in 2017. Our wedding was at Smith Playground in Fairmount Park - a beautiful old mansion attached to a huge playground. We wanted the day to be representative of the joy, happiness, and the warmth we feel towards each other - and what better way than to let your guests play on swings and a giant wooden slide?
We always knew that we wanted to grow our family and share the deep love we have for each other with an adopted child. We are so excited to take this step together to complete our family and welcome a child into our home and hearts.
Family Life
Spending time with family has always been very important to us. We feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in warm, loving, and supportive homes. Our parents and siblings all live nearby and we see and talk to them all the time. To say they’re excited about us growing our family through adoption would be an understatement! As soon as Alex came out as gay to his family, his mom immediately told him that it didn’t get him off the hook for having kids. Jesse’s sister has asked him about when we would start the adoption process nearly every day since we got married. If it takes a village to raise a kid, well, we can safely say we have a village—maybe even a small town or city! - Our parents have compassionate, generous, loving hearts and are beyond excited to welcome a new grandchild into our family.
Our close relationship with our families makes family traditions very important to us. Jesse grew up Jewish and Alex grew up Catholic, but plans to convert to Judaism so that we can share our heritage and traditions with our adopted child. We especially love celebrating holidays together - we spend Jewish holidays with Jesse’s family and Christmas and Easter with Alex’s family. We’re also excited to create new traditions that honor our child’s background, show them the importance of diversity, and appreciating differences in others.
We love spending a lot of time with our friends and their growing families. Alex has 3 godsons and we’re both godparents to our nephew and niece who lovingly refer to us as the fun uncles, or Funcles. We cherish getting to be such an important special part of their lives: not just visiting and playing with them, but being a rock for them that they can always count on. In addition to our families, we spend lots of time with our close friends and their 2 kids (who have a third on the way!) Whether it’s spending the day playing board games, hanging out at the Jersey shore, Jesse doing magic shows to amaze the kids (while they are young enough to believe coins can appear in their ears), or Alex bonding with them over video games, we love spending time with them and creating lasting memories.
Another special member of our family is our cat Eggs, a 12-year old Persian-Sphinx mix. He’s incredibly dog-like and the only things he loves more than spending time with us are finding a sunny napping spot and watching birds out the windows.
Lifestyle
It may sound a little corny, but we are genuinely each other’s best friends. We both feel so lucky to have found our soulmate and love spending as much time together as we can - whether it’s doing the New York Times crossword puzzle on weekend mornings, binging the latest TV show, or traveling to explore new places and meet new people. We also love to cook— both together and separately —Alex loves to bake bread and Jesse’s specialty is paella, which he learned to make while studying abroad in Spain.
We highly value our connections with our family and are inspired by the role models our parents were for us growing up. We come from families full of teachers and librarians that taught us to highly value education, gave us a sense of curiosity, and embedded a love of learning that sticks with us today. In addition to his day job, Jesse also teaches a college advertising class to help pay his knowledge and experience forward to the next generation.
Music is also very important to both of us - Jesse loves going to concerts and plays the violin, piano, and guitar; and Alex loves exploring and listening to new music from hip-hop to prog rock and jazz. We can’t wait to share our love of music with our child, make up songs, and host spontaneous dance parties.
In 2018, we moved from the city to our forever home in a small suburb in southern New Jersey - we love being a part of a diverse, tight knit community with so much to offer. We live in a Victorian-style house with a big, open backyard with lots of space to run and play. Our block has lots of young families, including a couple of other families with adopted children. We live about a 5-minute walk from schools, multiple parks and playgrounds, a lake, a downtown area with shopping and restaurants, and a train to easily access all that Philadelphia has to offer.
Adoption
We are committed to providing your child a fulfilled and happy life by maintaining as much contact as is comfortable for you. Whether it be visits at the annual Family Options picnic, regular email updates, photos, or anything else we can do - we want to work together to respect your wishes and help you feel as connected to your child and their life experiences as you want to be.
We believe that understanding and appreciating different cultures is essential to understanding yourself, the world around you, and to living a more fulfilling life. If we’re lucky enough to adopt a child from a different background than our own, we will do everything we can to embrace that and teach them more about their background. We promise to help them learn through experiences, and make sure they have role models in their life that look like them and they can relate to.
We have friends from diverse backgrounds who are always happy to share their traditions and experiences. We also love exploring cultures through food, music, and travel. Jesse minored in Spanish in college and studied abroad in Spain.
We would LOVE to learn more about your family and traditions - what you ate growing up, who you looked up to, what you did for fun, what stories your family told - we want our child to be comfortable knowing who they are and the culture they come from.
Favorites
| Father to be (Jesse) | Father to be (Alex) | |
| Genre of Music | Folk/Classic Rock | Any and everything! |
| Childhood memory | Summers at the shore | Going to NYC with family |
| Magazine | Entertainment Weekly | London Review of Books |
| TV show | The Office | Rupaul’s Drag Race |
| Movie | Anchorman | Fargo |
| Hero | My grandfather, a Holocaust survivor | Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| Holiday | Hanukkah | Thanksgiving |
| Bedtime story | The Very Hungry Caterpillar | Where the Wild Things Are |
| Dessert | Key lime pie | Tres Leches Cake |
| Coffee or Tea? | Coffee | Tea, all day! |
Best Wishes
Thank you again for taking the time to learn a little more about us. We’ve loved being close to the children in our lives and can’t wait to start a family of our own. We hope it’s clear how excited we are to grow our family through adoption and provide a joyful, warm, caring home for your child.
As gay men, we understand feeling different from those closest to you and the importance of unconditional honesty, love, and support from family in establishing your identity on that journey. We will ensure your child is raised in a warm, inclusive environment where they can be their authentic self and live to their fullest potential.
We can only imagine how hard this decision must be for you. If you trust us with the privilege of making your child a part of our family, they will grow up knowing who they are, knowing where they come from, and will always be loved unconditionally.
We hope to hear from you soon!
Jesse & Alex
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