For Olivia and Frankie, National Adoption Day was really their day, as their foster mother legally became their mother.
"She's awesome," said 10-year-old Olivia, "She's cared for us for a very, very long time."
At Judge Bernadette Conway's invitation, she and her sister said their new names as they sat at a table in a Middletown courtroom - Olivia Mercedes Lopez and Francesca Nicole Lopez. Their new mother, Daisy Lopez, took them in in June 2011.
"I am adopting the girls because I fell in love with them and they have become part of my life and there was no way I was gonna let them go," she said.
She adopted them, on the day state officials arranged for 43 children to be adopted, joining 384 children adopted in Connecticut in 2013.
"This is just a dream becoming a reality for these girls, this beautiful foster mother and her family," said Madelyn Guzman, the DCF social worker who originally placed them with Daisy Lopez, "and me".
Another DCF official gave the girls necklaces as gifts. To 9-year-old Francesca, known as Frankie, "I think it means together forever!"
