Jennifer Naussner – “When I was growing up, my mom fostered a little girl. I saw the difference it made in her life, and it really impacted me.
I used to work for DSS Spartanburg, and my husband Jeremy still does, so we both know a lot about the child welfare system. We wanted to use our knowledge and experience to help as many children as we could, which led us to become foster parents.
Jeremy and I have five biological children, and we’re fostering three – one of whom we are in the process of adopting. We’re also about to be placed with a baby, a newborn sibling of the foster son we’re in the process of adopting. All of our foster children are under 10, except our oldest foster child who is 12, and one is special needs.
While Jeremy and I work so well as a team and are strong communicators, it got extremely hard keeping up with all of our children’s needs and wants. I would describe our home environment as organized chaos. We were surviving, not thriving. There was a time I didn’t know if we would be able to keep fostering, because it was so hard. We desperately needed someone who could come take just one thing off our plate.
We got plugged in to Fostering the Family through their Greenville Support Group, and they set up a Care Community for us in October. They’re bringing us meals, helping with our laundry every week, and even developed a rotating schedule to help us with cleaning. It has been such an incredible blessing to have one night a week where I don’t have to think about dinner, so I can actually sit down and spend quality time with my kids. Before this, I was spending the whole weekend doing laundry. For the first time, this has given us a church community, family, and friends. It’s so nice to finally have other people to lean on.
Our Care Community invited us to join the church who has been serving us, and since we started going, we have found so much blessing, connection, and community there. I grew up going to church, but my husband Jeremy didn’t. I really missed that part of my life, but he never had an interest in going – until now! Now he’s excited to go every week and learn the teachings!”
0 Comments