The Father that stepped in: Family complete after Christmas adoption

Webster's dictionary defines adopt as: to legally take another's child and bring it up as one's own. Adoption is not at all unusual in blended families, and customarily takes place when children are young and still living at home with their parents. The recent adoption of Cheyanne Dawn Hamilton-Stuart was anything but customary.

Sam and Ann Stuart of Forsyth celebrated their twelfth anniversary on July 9th of this year. On August 7, at 10:00 a.m., at the Rosebud County Courthouse, Sam Stuart adopted his stepdaughter, 28-year-old Cheyanne Dawn Hamilton.

Sam and Ann are an internet success story, having met in an online chatroom on the day after Christmas in 2004. Sam was living in Havre, and Ann lived in Chinook, a mere 29 miles apart. "Our lives intersected at various times throughout, but we had never met," Sam said.

The couple met for lunch the next day, and Sam met Ann's 15-year-old daughter Cheyanne later that evening. "The minute I saw her, I fell in love with her, plain and simple. And I knew she was the daughter I had never had," Sam recounted.

Sam and Ann got engaged on January 17, 2005. "People thought maybe we were moving too fast, but we just knew," Ann says. Five days later, Ann flew to Arizona to be with her daughter Shayla for the birth of her baby, and Sam and his younger son moved in with Cheyanne.

"We blended really well," Sam commented. "Even though I had two sons, and didn't know what having a daughter was like. I've loved her from the very beginning."

"It wasn't always roses," Ann added. "But children are like that with their natural parents." Sam and Ann have three other children: Shayla, 37; Adam, 32; and Jonas, 27.

Before their July wedding, Sam asked Cheyanne if she wanted to take his name. She said no; she'd had her name a long time, and that's what everyone knew her by. That was okay with Sam; he still felt like she was his daughter.

"At the very beginning, she called me her stepdad," Sam recalls. But she's almost always called him her father. For Christmas that year, Sam gave Cheyanne a promise ring as a symbol of his vow to her to never leave her.

Sam settled easily into the role of father to a teenage daughter. Cheyanne was very into sports, and Sam went to every game, and made sure to make his presence known. "She knew I was there," he said. Laughing, Ann added, "And so did everybody else."

Cheyanne's 18th birthday happened to fall on Parent's Night for basketball during Cheyanne's senior year. Sam presented her with a dozen roses, and sang happy birthday to her in front of her teammates and a gym full of people. "Since she was a teenager, she was embarrassed," Ann said, "but deep down, she was really very moved."

Over the last twelve years, Sam had asked Cheyanne on three other occasions if she wanted him to adopt her. Each time, her answer was no. Until December of 2016.

At Christmas, Cheyanne talked to Sam. "I have a question to ask you," she said. "Will you be my dad?"

"I said absolutely. It's what I've always wanted," Sam said. "But I had to ask her, is this what you really want?"

Cheyanne confirmed it. "Yes, it's what I want. I want to take your name, too; I want to be a Stuart," she told him.

Cheyanne, who turned 28 in January, had consulted her mother about her plans six or seven months prior to asking Sam, and asked her what she thought his reaction would be. "You will make his day," Ann told her.

"I was scared to death that I would slip up," Ann said. "All I could think for months was, 'I hope I don't give this away!'"

Sam and Ann consulted an attorney regarding the adoption, but the retainer alone was exorbitant. They had friends in Chinook who had already gone through the process, so Ann contacted them. "They sent all the paperwork," she said, "so I just filled in all the blanks except where and when, and filed it with the court."

"It was a long road, and it's taken us a long time to get there, but it was well worth it," Sam added.

"I'm going to have a dad who really cares about me," Cheyanne told her mom a couple of weeks before the adoption took place.

"I could have just bawled," Ann said.

Although they didn't tell anyone else, the couple took a vacation a month or so ago to tell their other children what was going to take place.

"We stressed about telling them; we wanted them to be okay with it," Ann said. "We stressed for nothing, because they said, 'We thought you did that a long time ago.'"

Cheyanne lives in Missoula, where she has worked at Opportunity Resources for the last five years. She traveled to Forsyth for the adoption ceremony that took place on Monday. As the adoption process finally came to a close on Monday, Cheyanne said all the memories of the last twelve years came into her mind. "Today, I feel the completeness of being a family," she said.

Sam and Ann feel the same way. At the family celebration that took place Monday evening at M&M Pizza, Sam wore a shirt that read, "I am not the stepfather, I am the father that stepped in."