A Daphne couple’s creative Christmas card announcing plans to adopt through the foster care system has drawn national attention, turning a personal family milestone into a viral moment that has put a spotlight on foster adoption across the country.
Cara and Eric Taylor, married nearly five years, decided early in their marriage that adoption would be part of their family’s story. “We felt adopting through the foster care system was where we needed to be. God was calling us,” Cara Taylor said. The decision reflects a conviction the couple has carried throughout their marriage, that the path to parenthood for them would run through children who need one.
Cara, 31, works at Regions Bank and also works as a photographer, while Eric, 27, serves as an Army recruiter currently based at the Army Career Center office in the Eastern Shore Center. The couple, both originally from Florida, has also lived in Kentucky and Texas before settling in Daphne, making the Eastern Shore community their chosen home base as Eric’s military career continues.
Rather than simply announcing the adoption to friends and family, the Taylors wanted a way to bring attention to the foster care system itself. They designed a Christmas card featuring a collection of small children’s shoes, a visual meant to represent the child who would eventually join their family. The image paired the traditional warmth of a holiday card with a subject most families never see pictured: the empty place at the table waiting for a foster child.
“To me, sitting there with a little sign saying ‘We are adopting’ just didn’t do it,” Cara said. “We wanted to bring attention to the foster care system as well.” The distinction the couple drew, between announcing their own news and advocating for a system, is what turned a family card into a message that traveled far beyond their Christmas mailing list.
From a card to a national audience
The image took off after Cara shared it with Together We Rise, a nonprofit focused on supporting children in foster care. The card quickly became a hit on Facebook, and the buzz eventually led to an interview request from the Today show. The trajectory, from a photographer’s card design to national morning television, shows how a single resonant image can carry a message that institutional campaigns struggle to land.
Cara said the viral attention wasn’t the goal, but she has welcomed it. “It definitely was not our intent for it to go viral. But if it has people talking about and looking into the foster care system, I’m excited it’s going that way,” she said. The couple has used the platform the card created to talk about a system most Americans know only in outline: that children wait in foster care, sometimes for years, for permanent families.
The card’s power came from its simplicity. Children’s shoes, arranged in the frame of a holiday photograph, communicate what statistics cannot: that behind every foster care number is a child whose belongings often travel in bags, whose shoes mark the distance between placements, and whose arrival in a home changes everything about it. Holiday cards are ordinarily documents of what a family has; the Taylors’ card was a document of what their family was waiting for.
Together We Rise, the nonprofit where the image first found its audience, works on the practical side of that message. Organizations in the foster space focus on the everyday needs that bureaucracies miss, from providing children with suitcases instead of trash bags when they move between placements to funding advocacy and family support. A viral image routed through that channel carried the message to an audience already primed to act on it.
The reaction on Facebook, where the card became a hit, reflected how many families have some connection to foster care, as former foster children, foster parents, caseworkers or people who have considered fostering without taking the first step. Comment threads on posts like this one typically fill with exactly the questions the Taylors themselves had asked before deciding: How does the process work? What does the training involve? Who qualifies?
The process ahead for the Taylors
The Taylors were set to begin ten weeks of state-required training at the end of January to prepare for fostering and eventually adopting a child. The training requirement applies to every prospective foster family in Alabama, covering child development, trauma and its effects on behavior, the legal structure of the foster system, and the realities of working with birth families and caseworkers.
During that process, social workers conduct background checks and evaluate the couple’s home before compiling a file that will be shared with agencies across the state as officials work to match the Taylors with a child. The home study examines safety, space, finances and stability, and the resulting file becomes the family’s introduction to the caseworkers who make matching decisions. The matching process can move quickly or take months, depending on what kind of placement a family is approved and willing to accept.
The couple said they aren’t focused on a specific age, gender or ethnicity, but are looking for the right match for their family, and they’re hopeful the adoption process will be complete by summer. Openness across age and background enlarges the pool of children they might be matched with, and it reflects the reality of foster adoption: the children who wait longest for permanent families are frequently older children, sibling groups and children with particular needs.
Alabama’s foster system, like systems across the country, has more children entering care than families willing to take them in. The gap is sharpest for the categories the Taylors are deliberately leaving open. Every family that completes training and a home study adds capacity to a system that runs on exactly that kind of household-level commitment.
Why the story resonates in Daphne and beyond
Daphne, on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, is a community of military families, church congregations and commuters who work across the bay in Mobile. It is precisely the kind of community where foster and adoption networks run through churches, workplaces and neighbor-to-neighbor connections, and where a story like the Taylors’ spreads through personal channels as fast as through the media.
Eric’s role as an Army recruiter at the Eastern Shore Center office places the family inside another network with its own culture of service. Military families already understand the logistics of welcoming change on a timeline they don’t control, and the same flexibility that comes with military life, housing moves, deployments, adjusted expectations, is also what foster parenting demands. Families connected to the military are often natural candidates for foster work, having already built lives around service to people they haven’t met.
Cara’s dual career in banking and photography turned out to be the story’s engine. The card that went viral was her design and her photograph, and the couple’s announcement succeeded as advocacy precisely because it was crafted with professional skill. A talented photographer’s Christmas card was always going to look striking; the subject matter is what made it spread.
The Taylors’ faith framing, that God was calling them to foster adoption, also reflects the reality of foster care in Alabama and the Gulf South, where congregations supply a large share of foster families, support services and wraparound help. Church-based networks provide meals, childcare and respite for foster families, and they are often where families first hear that fostering is something people like them actually do.
The couple’s hope to complete the adoption by summer gives their story a timeline, though foster timelines rarely obey family plans. Placements can change, reunification with birth family is often the first goal of the system, and the path from fostering to adoption runs through legal processes that take as long as they take. The Taylors’ openness about the journey, rather than just its destination, is part of what makes their story useful to other families considering the same step.
What happens after the cameras move on matters just as much as the viral moment. Families inspired by stories like this one can start with a call to their county Department of Human Resources, attend an informational session, or simply talk to a foster family about what the first year looks like. The distance between seeing a card on Facebook and sitting in a ten-week training class is long, but every foster family in the system made that exact journey, one step at a time.
Cara said she hopes their story encourages others to consider foster adoption. “I truly believe every child deserves to grow up feeling loved,” she said. “These kids didn’t ask for this to happen to them.” The sentence is the whole argument of the card condensed: a collection of small shoes, a family with room in it, and a system that needs both. For a Daphne couple that wanted their Christmas card to mean something beyond their own good news, the national attention is the byproduct. The point was always the children waiting, and the families who might not yet know they are the answer.