Families come in all shapes and sizes.
That’s what James and Nellie Schraml found out. They are an older couple living in San Antonio, Texas. Although they didn’t plan to conceive their own children, it had long been a dream of Nellie’s to foster older children, particularly teenagers.
When they finally gave it a try, their hearts and home grew, and they are delighted at the changes that adopting children created in their lives. They shared their story, and it’s beautiful to see how this adoption helped not just the children, but also the parents.
They married later in life and didn’t try to conceive children. But they realized that they wanted more.
So they turned their focus to the foster care system. They realized that fostering children would give them the opportunity to pour love and care into kids they could raise as their own.
When they signed up to foster, they got set up with an emergency placement of two teen brothers. Their names were Sain, 17, and Justice, 13.
After a few months they decided to adopt the boys, and it’s taught them so much about familial love.
In March of this year, the adoption was completed. That doesn’t mean that everything’s been easy. Nellie describes the healthy anxiety that most parents can relate to. She told KENS 5:
“Sometimes I’m thinking, ‘Is this how this is supposed to be?’… There were times that I was scared because I was like, ‘Am I meeting their needs enough? Am I doing anything right?’ and I start to worry. My friends would say if you’re not worrying then you would be doing something wrong, so because you worry it shows that you love these boys. You are doing everything right.”
For the boy’s part, they are so happy in their new home and describe a feeling of safety they had not known before.
One of the benefits of adoption is that it can provide children with circumstances they did not get the chance to experience before or often. For Sain and Justice, they both agree that they dealt with a lot of high-stress experiences before being adopted by Nellie and James. Sain says that he used to worry about himself and his brother a lot, but now they can get comfortable in their home.
For his part, Justice appreciates the love that his parents give him every day:
“I can trust with anything, and I can talk to them about anything…I feel more stable and more secure…Lots of kids don’t have that, but yeah, it’s nice, really nice.”
Just like their kids, the parents feel that their lives have been utterly transformed and improved.
It’s hard to be fully prepared for what parenthood will feel like and how it will change your life. James and Nellie certainly never saw this happening in their lives, but now they can agree that it’s so right. James told KENS 5:
“It has been an amazing journey, and it has changed my life completely…I was apprehensive going in, but I’ve been truly blessed.”
Watch the video below to learn more about this incredible family.
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