Family Shares Their Fostering and Adoption Story to Inspire Others
“I was 17 and I’ve been to like a bajillion foster homes at this point. And I was told this is my last one. So I like had to make it work, you know, and I didn’t really have high expectations and high hopes,” he explained. “And then I get here and it’s very welcoming. And I felt happy, you know, like part of family.”
A Mt. Juliet [Tennessee] family adopted their teenage son after several years of fostering children through the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services.
“We went through the process of becoming approved but it kind of started with a speaker at church and not knowing the need and hearing about it and realizing that it was something we could do wanted to do should do,” recalled foster and adoptive parent Clint Haynes.
Haynes and his wife Lacie explained their first foster children came through their doors in 2016 right as they were starting their own family.
“We started with zero to seven. And so we immediately got four boys that were like three to eight. And then from there, we kind of grew and you become you know more comfortable and because we’ve been doing this about five years so you know, you just start to get your legs under you and realize that like most kids are just kids no matter how old they are, you know, like a teenage boy can sound really scary. But then, once you’ve kind of been in this world and then you meet your other foster friends, teenage boys and stuff like that. You’re like, oh, ‘OK, so it’s just kind of like a baby in a big kid body,'” said Lacie.
Nine foster kids later, in 2019, the Haynes’ opened their home to a 17-year-old boy.
“Quincy came his senior year of high school. Oliver [our biological son] was nine months old, like fall of senior year and then the spring, you know, the tornado happened like right around spring break and then COVID was like a week later,” recalled Lacie…
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