Chaddock is consistently rated as one of the top foster care agencies in the state of Illinois. Foster parents shape lives and in the process experience both the challenges and rewards that come with the task. Every effort is made to heal broken family units and return children to a secure and caring home with their birth parents. When this is not possible, we work to transition children into permanency through adoption.
This story comes from a family who worked with Chaddock on their foster and adoption journey.
“The journey to becoming a foster/adoptive parent is not an easy one. There are home inspections, background checks, seamlessly endless paperwork, and classes to take. But it starts very simply – the knowledge that there is a child/children in this world, our country, your hometown that needs you and the desire to do something about it. From there, the rest just doesn’t matter.
My husband and I couldn’t have our own children, and I count that as a blessing. It didn’t matter to us if our children had Jason’s eyes or my smile, we just wanted a child to call our own. Had we been able to have our own children we never would have had the opportunity to adopt Hunter – the adorable 3-month-old boy that just needed a home.
He was our first foster placement, and we were our Social Worker Gina’s first case. We call her our Stork – you know the fable about the bird that delivers babies to expectant parents. Well, that’s exactly what Gina did. She delivered Hunter to our home, sat with us, talked with us, explained how things would work going forward. We are still in contact with Gina 7 years later and consider her just another one of the blessings in our adoption story.
As an adoptive family, we get to celebrate becoming a family with much more than just Hunter’s birthday. We also have Stork Day (our reference of the day Gina brought him to us) and Gotcha Day (his adoption day) which came 18 months later. It has been six years since we have adopted Hunter. He is your typical 7-year-old boy: endless energy, athletic, adores his cousins and wants a puppy. He has been to 22 states and four countries, has tried and excelled at several different sports, he makes friends easily and loves to laugh.
He is in every way our son, and we have Gina and Chaddock to thank for that.”
