Coli's story

Coli had been waiting for her adoptive family for more than a year when she was featured on ITV's This Morning to raise awareness of children who desperately needed a loving home. Coli's mum, Kate, tells her story:

Simon and I can’t remember a time when we didn’t want to adopt. Even before we got married we agreed that fostering or adoption was definitely the way we wanted to bring children into our family.

We got married at 21 and within a year fell pregnant with our first child, reasonably quickly followed by child two and then three. By the age of 27 we were a family of five but the idea of fostering or adopting hadn’t gone away, so we started to make enquiries. It was suggested to us by our local authority that we waited until our youngest child was five before starting the application process. A few weeks after our youngest's fifth birthday we enquired again, and the process began. By this time, we were sure that the permanency of adoption was the right fit for our family and so we put fostering to one side.

Our application process took three years from the initial enquiry until we were eventually approved in the summer of 2013. During this process, we had plenty of time to discuss what 'type' of children we felt able to adopt. Inspired by a talk from Krish Kandiah at a Christian conference, we started to seriously consider adopting a so-called 'hard to place' child. We trusted our social worker to find a child for us and very quickly after panel she started to send us profiles of children.

Whilst this was going on, our daughter’s social worker was given the opportunity to have Coli featured on ITVs this morning as part of an article talking about children who desperately needed homes. She’d been available for adoption for over a year and they felt this was her last chance.

The show received hundreds of enquiries about this cute baby, but once they found out about her additional needs they all quickly backed off.

Our social worker sent us Coli’s profile just before Christmas and as soon as we read it we knew that this was exactly the type of child we wanted to welcome into our family. We were desperate to find out more, but everyone was off over Christmas! As soon as the new year came, our social worker came around with more information and showed us the DVD of Coli on This Morning. I could barely see the TV through my tears as I knew for sure that she was our daughter.

Coli came home just a couple of months later and has blown out of the water all the predictions made about her, partly due to an early slight misdiagnosis of her chromosome disorder, and in large part because of the incredibly determined girl that she is. She is adored by her older siblings (well, most of the time!) and it’s hard to remember a time when she wasn’t part of our family.

We are now a family of seven having adopted again 18 months after Coli arrived but that’s another story.....