Renee Henderson shares her story of Foster Care and Adoption with our listeners.
Vicki:
Hi guys. Today we have Renee Henderson and we are talking about adoption and I have to say since I have moved here to Arizona, I have known Renee pretty much the whole time I’ve been here and she has just been an amazing person that I have watched her family grow and she’s been just an inspiration. Her family has grown and changed and expanded and just watching everything that she’s done here in the neighborhood has just been an inspiration for me. So Renee would you like to tell me about your family and your background?
Renee: 00:38 My name’s Renee and my husband and I, we have been married for this will be 11 years. We currently have three children, a six year old, a five-year-old at a four year old, so very close in age. They’re 13 and 11 months apart. I stay at home with them full time and my husband works in traffic securities and cameras and things like that.
Vicki:
Yeah, you guys have a lot going on with that age group. So close together. I too have close together. But yours is a little closer together then. My, so can you tell me about, the adoption process for yourself? How did that go?
Renee: Yeah. \my husband and I, we knew right when we got married that we wanted to have a family pretty quickly. after a couple of years of marriage, we realized that wasn’t happening. So we started seeking out and fertility treatments and specialists and things like that.
And we just got to the point where we could continue to dump thousands and thousands of dollars into this or we could start to look at other options. So we originally decided to look at foster care specifically to maybe to help kids that were already needing a home while we decided what we wanted to do to build a family forever. I, we knew that adoption through foster care was possible, but we assumed it was pretty unlikely. And so we never kind of put all our eggs in that basket to build a family, but we wanted to be parents and we were ready for that. So we thought that was a great idea while we waited to decide what was next. and so we started the process and then we were licensed to add, it was like 12 o’clock, almost exactly on a Monday. And we picked up our first baby by three o’clock that day.Speaker 1 02:22 Wow. And he never left. And can you tell me about the licensing process? Yes. So licensing, it varies for everyone. we took, we, we went very slowly. We took about a year to do it. we purposely were kind of unsure when you’d go through the process you have to take at the time it was 10 weeks of three hours a week classes and they kind of throw the worst of the worst case scenarios at you. And so we got through with that, those classes and we were like, you know what, maybe this isn’t for us. We took a little bit of break, and then realized, no, this is ultimately what we wanted to do. And so we, we went back to it. But,you have to do, like I said, the classes, you have background checks, you have multiple interviews, references, home inspections, things like that.
Renee: The average person, it takes about six months to become licensed. Okay. And you said you had to take a couple steps back. What, what made you go, wait a second, I’m not sure if this was for us. It was there like one thing or was it a pain of things? We, there was a couple of classes back to back that we had that were really hard. The first one was like extreme behaviors in children and they talked about things like smearing feces on the walls and physical aggression and runaways and kind of just for, you know, young babies going through withdrawal, like extreme cases of colic type stuff or even worse, like medically fragile. And so that kind of scared us. And then we went into one about reasons kids could be in care and their biological families. And it was a little terrifying to know that we were go
