Meet the Atkins Family!
They say you don’t have to be the perfect parent to adopt, well I beg to differ. At least it feels that you have to, or at least act it. Jeff and I married in January 1999 and knew that conceiving a child would pose its challenges. We were married for approximately 10 years and decided to explore foster to adopt programs. We contacted our local county DHR and they set us up with foster parent classes. After 6 weeks of sharing our personal lives with other potential foster parents and honestly thinking that this was a walk in the park, we had the first child placed in our home. He was 9 months old and stayed with us for about 6 months. He was then placed with his biological grandmother, where he still lives to this day, 14 years later. To say that we were heartbroken when he was removed from our home would be an understatement. If only we could have seen what the future held for us.
In August 2007, I was at work and received a call from DHR asking if we would be willing to foster a 2-day old baby boy straight from the hospital. He had tested positive for cocaine and the family members that were contacted were not willing or able to take care of him. When he was first placed in our home, we would take him to the monthly DHR visits with his birth mother. After about 3 months of the birth mother not showing up for visits, the state filed a petition for termination of parental rights. We finalized the adoption and Will became officially part of the Atkins family.
For 7 years, he was an only child and got 100 percent of our attention. He began asking for a little sister, so we explored the option of adoption again. It had been over 5 years, so our license and home study had expired. We had to start from the very beginning in order to adopt. Even though this process often seemed confusing and frustrating, we hung in there and completed what was required. In the Summer of 2014, we were contacted by the local DHR worker that the State of Alabama had a potential match for our family. It was not 1 child, but 2! A brother and a sister ages 7 and 10. This was a huge decision to make and after much prayer and discussion, we made the choice to meet the children and see where it would go. Jeff and I first met Lucas and Sophia (names were different until adopted) and then introduced them to Will. It seemed an instant connection for all of us. In March 2015, they were legally adopted and their first and last names changed at their request.
Adopting a baby with no knowledge of their past is a whole different ballgame than adopting a 7 and a 10-year-old who had so many memories of their birth mother, grandparents, and older sister. These memories were a mixture of good and bad but we had to find a way to use their past to shape their future. Seven years later, and here we are. We have grown in ways I never thought possible. Will is now the middle child at age 14, Lucas the oldest now at 17, and Sophia at 14. I tell people that infertility was the biggest blessing I could have ever been given.
