This is Gabriella Guardado, a 22-year-old registered nurse from Florida who has a pretty cool stepdad that she recently surprised with a very unexpected birthday gift.
Gabriella’s mother, Lori Ann Lynde, said that she and David had been married since 2004, when Gabby was 10, following an abusive relationship with the father of Gabriella and three of her siblings.
Gabriella had wanted Lynde to adopt her since she was 12, but her biological father would not sign off on the papers, so she just kind of gave up until she learned that adult adoption was a possibility.
“I did research and found out that I could do that without the consent of my biological dad,” she said, and she prepared the paperwork as a gift for David’s 53rd birthday, putting it at the bottom of a gift bag.
As you'll see in the video below, Lynde is a great sport and looks thrilled to see what he thinks is his gift — a pen.
He then is shown digging through the bag and pulling out the papers.
Holding the stack in his hand, he reads out "adult adoption" before skimming through the pages, still not fully understanding what was going on.
“His reaction was so funny because at first he had no idea what I was handing,” Gabriella said of the video, “when it clicked, he just started crying, which made me cry and my mom and everyone else in the room.”
