Naomi Malone is a ten-year-old looking forward to starting fifth grade at Liberty Elementary this week.
Doug and Cassie Malone, together with their other daughters Madison and Khloee, celebrated another milestone aside from the changing of grades: another new addition to the Malone family.
The Malones have been foster parents to Naomi since she was seven. She was best friends with their other (also adopted) daughter Madison, and when they got the call to ask about fostering Naomi, the family couldn’t believe it.
“They were already pretty much sisters at that point, then they really became sisters,” Cassie said.
And now it’s official: Naomi has joined the Malone family. The family celebrated with a “drive-by adoption celebration,” earlier this week so that those who wanted to celebrate the growing family could drive by and honk or wave. Many did, including friends, neighbors, and even the Sapulpa Police Department.
Doug and Cassie are certainly not strangers to the adoption process, having gone through it already, and Cassie took on an identity of a different sort through her home bakery, Sugar Mama Cakery. She began baking free birthday cakes for foster kids just a couple of years ago. To date, she’s done over 400. “It’s amazing, how much that has grown,” she told Sapulpa Times on Tuesday.
One especially large event happened last Christmas season, hosted at the Burnett Mansion and sponsored by the Make Sense Foundation. That event was so successful that they made the decision to move it to a larger location this season, and included even more for the foster children’s Christmas experience.
Naomi found out she was getting adopted during Christmas of 2020. “I was really, really excited,” she said. Now that the day has arrived, she can look forward to the next chapter of her life as she grows up with a real family.
“I want to be a surgeon,” she says, sitting in her chair, waving to honking cars passing by.
Naomi, we’re looking forward to telling that story.
