By the time she was a teenager, Jennifer Allred already knew she wanted to adopt one day. So when she and her now-husband Mike were dating, she made sure to tell him that.
“I let him know then that that was my plan and that he had to be okay with it,” she says. He was.
After they had their biological son, Jacob, they began to talk about expanding their family.
“We were going to adopt one child, and they were going to be between two and five years old,” laughs Jennifer. “The Lord has a sense of humor! None of that happened.”
Instead, they met Andrew (now 23), who came to them on his 18th birthday. They were his sixteenth placement.
“He was a very soft-spoken kid, and he ate a lot,” says Jennifer. “We were intimidated, nervous, and definitely insecure in our ability to parent a teenager. But we found out very quickly that Andrew was just a normal teenager in an abnormal situation.”