Tammy Waltz(CHARLOTTE, N.C.) — A North Carolina couple has captured the hearts of their family and friends after announcing that they’d be adopting four siblings.
“I didn’t want to do the typical, ‘Hey guys, we’re adopting’ Facebook announcement,” Tammy Waltz of Charlotte, North Carolina, told ABC News. “I wanted something I could always remember and I wanted something that my kids remembered.”
Waltz said she and her husband Drew fell in love with a group of brothers and sisters, three boys and one girl, after hosting them for the Christmas holiday and five weeks over the summer.
The couple acted as the kids’ host family through Opens Hearts and Homes for Children, a non-profit organization that help children in Eastern Europe experience life outside of the institutional setting in American homes.
“We are thrilled that our program brought together this special family and these orphaned children, and so excited for the impending adoption that will keep these children together,” a spokeswoman from Opens Hearts and Homes wrote to ABC News in an email.
“They are so, so sweet. They’re loving, extremely affectionate,” Waltz said about the siblings. “They have their moments, but it doesn’t deter us. They are awesome kids.”
When they had to leave the Waltz’s home, the couple decided they wanted them to come back.
“After [Christmas] they came over for summer,” Waltz said, “It was soon after they left when we decided that we were going to adopt.”
Starting in March, Waltz said she began recording the reactions of her loved ones they learned she and Drew decided to officially adopt the four siblings.
She showed the video to the children once it was completed.
“They were excited,” Waltz recalled. “They had been asking us for quite a bit if we were going to do it, if they were going to stay with us forever.”
Michelle Ziner, friend of the Waltz family and the North Carolina, South Carolina coordinator for Open Hearts and Homes for Children, appears in Waltz’s adoption announcement video.
“You can tell there was a different relationship with everyone in that video,” Ziner told ABC News. “I was thrilled because I saw them in action during our hosting and for a couple who had not parented before, they exhibited the most caring, gentle and kind yet firm parenting with the kids.”
“When they came and were in the home, they operated like a [biological] family,” she said. “I did not for a minute worry that they could not do it.”
Waltz hopes the adoption can be finalized by early 2018.
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