Congratulations to the Leonard family! Tasha and Kennteth… we rejoice with the new addition to your family with baby Asher!

After a difficult journey to parenthood, Tasha Cobbs Leonard couldn’t be more excited to introduce her baby boy to the world.

Nearly eight months after welcoming their son Asher via adoption, the gospel singer, 40, and her music producer husband Kenneth are sharing their adoption story as well as the first photos of their adorable little boy exclusively with PEOPLE.

“Asher means happy. His middle name means chosen by God and he literally lives up to his name,” says Tasha. “He wakes up laughing. He’s laughing all day unless he’s asleep. He loves to play.”

The couple’s decision to adopt followed a long struggle with infertility and in vitro fertilization.

“We were trying to kind of figure out which ways would make it work and throughout going throughout it, all of those ways ended up not working for us. And our faith was tested,” Kenneth explains. “One of the things that I’m really happy for is that at the end of that process, our hearts were still open to God doing this, how he chose to do it. It really strengthened our faith, looking back, God really kept his promise to us.”

“After all of the disappointment, and it was many times that we tried and we were disappointed, but you have to have something internally that saying, I believe that this is what is meant for me,” adds the “You Know My Name” singer.

“So to have Asher now, and just the story behind how we got him, it is beyond what we could have imagined or expected,” she continues. “He is more than what we could have prayed for. So we are super excited just to watch him every day. Sometimes we look at him and say, ‘This is real?’ “

Tasha says she and Kenneth had a “beautiful” adoption experience and that it was “such a blessing to have an amazing agency” to help them. The couple was placed with a birth mother one month prior to her due date and brought baby Asher home with them after his birth.

“If you desire a child, and you’ve been struggling, adoption has been beautiful for us,” the artist says. “It’s literally like Asher is our blood.”

Asher joins three older siblings — Kenneth’s kids from a previous marriage — who are “so in love with their baby brother,” says Tasha, who is partnering with shoe store The Athlete’s Foot on their signature program StAART, which stands for Strategic African American Retail Track.

The couple says “everybody was so excited” when they first shared the adoption news with their family on a Zoom call.

“They were crying. The kids were talking about what they were going to do. Tiffany, our youngest daughter. She was like, ‘I’m going to change diapers.’ And the oldest says, ‘He’s sleeping with me.’ And they have literally been that excited since that day, until now,” Tasha recalls. “It has never been an issue with Asher fitting into the family.”

In sharing their story with the world, Tasha hopes to encourage people to “keep their faith.”

“If you have faith for something, if you’re believing for something, don’t ever give up on it,” she says. “I know even in the last two or three years, it’s been hard to walk in faith because so many people have gone through so much. But we want our story to show, that even in the last two years, God is still working on the promises that he’s given us.”

SOURCE: People Magazine