Boy sells lemonade to help pay for his own adoption
At 9 years old, Tristan Jacobson has faced more adversity than many adults. But rather than focus on the lemons life handed him, he made lemonade.
Literally.
This weekend, the Missouri third-grader set up a lemonade stand at a family yard sale to raise money to help pay for his own adoption.
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Jacobson sat out in front of the home he shares with Donnie and Jimmy Davis in Springfield on Friday and Saturday selling $1 lemonades.
"Thank you for helping our adoption,"Jacobson shouted to customers as he handed them a drink under the watchful eye of his guardians Donnie Davis.
The Davis' have been Tristan's kinship guardians since he was 5. His biological parents were unable to care for him, and he was placed in their custody.
The pair was eager to adopt Jacobson, but the high legal fees required for the adoption had held them back. So they decided to run a series of fundraisers to make his status in their family official.
The Springfield News Leader described Jacobson patiently sitting in front of his home in Springfield and mixing up cups of lemonade for passersby.
"She will be my parent," he told the paper as he pointed to Donnie Davis. "I'm happy because I have a new mom who loves me."
Donnie Davis told the paper that the lemonade stand and a weekend yard sale raised $7,100 to assist with the adoption legal fees. Nearly $10,000 been donated via "Tristan's Adoption Fund" on YouCaring.com in recent weeks.
"There's not enough words to say 'thank you' to everyone," Davis says, noting that she and her husband already consider Tristan their son.
She says the adoption is "more for reassurance for him, knowing that he has his forever family and he has our name."
Additional information from the Associated Press.
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Megan Specia was Mashable's Assistant Real-Time News Editor and joined the team in September 2014. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism & Mass Communications from the University of New Hampshire after growing up in the Jersey 'burbs. She made her way to New York via a four year stopover in Dublin. Megan previously worked as a journalist and editor at Storyful in both Dublin and New York. Before all of that, though, her claim to fame was as head cake arranger and purveyor of all things sweet at Queen of Tarts cafe in Dublin, where she developed a serious addiction to macarons.
