The Allard Family

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Charlie and SisterMeet Charleigh and Family

“As a military family we have moved a lot, but we have been able to call Virginia our home since 2015. This past spring my husband retired from the Army, which means we could live wherever we want. But Northern Virginia has so many great resources, schools, and of course Jill’s House. There’s no reason we would leave!”

 

“We have 2 daughters, and my mother lives with us as well. Our oldest has gone off to college which means Charleigh, our 15-year-old daughter is the center of all our attention.

Charleigh is a happy, healthy girl who loves her iPhone, taking rides in the van to school, playing outside, and eating good food.”

Charleigh and Sister Younger“Before moving to Virginia, we lived in Oklahoma, which is where Charleigh was born, New York, and Texas. Charleigh was much younger when we received the first diagnosis of Severe ASD.”

“When Charleigh was 10 years old, we received an official genetic diagnosis. She has CDK13 which is an incredibly rare genetic disorder, with only 231 known cases worldwide. When she was younger, we actively pursued different therapies and doctors. We researched the genetic components of her diagnosis to provide the best care for her, and to help her achieve her milestones. Then when we moved to Virginia, a lot of opportunities opened for us. The resources are incredible! We had never really considered the scope of supports available for us here in Virginia.”

 

Charleigh and Ronald McDonald“Shortly after arriving in Virginia, Charleigh’s developmental pediatrician asked if we had heard about Jill’s House, which of course we hadn’t. Hearing about Jill’s House was a complete blessing!! We were so focused on providing the best care for Charleigh, that the idea of respite had never entered our minds.

Charleigh first started going to Jill’s House when she was 8 ½ years old. Her first visit was a weekend stay and she loved it! Our whole family loved it. She has been going to Jill’s House for almost 7 years now, so we have all grown to really appreciate and value those weekends.”

 

Allard_ Charleigh _4_“Jill’s House is set up to meet all Charleigh’s needs. She enjoys different activities and transitioning quickly between those activities. The staff are so attentive, kind, and patient with her. Charleigh is provided a mini vacation with play on the moon bounce, swimming in the pool, and fun outside on the playground. While Charleigh is at Jill’s House we enjoy a slower pace at home. We eat dinners while watching movies and enjoy quiet mornings.

Charleigh attends a private, day placement year-round school. Her school is so great, and best suited for her and her needs. Another benefit is that Jill’s House partners with her school and provides weeknight stays for students. Jill’s House staff pick up the students from the school, the students spend the night at Jill’s House, and then staff return the students to school the next morning. So, during the school year, Charleigh also gets to stay at Jill’s House one night a week.”

“Jill’s House has been the one constant in our lives for so many years. In fact, Charleigh has been going to Jill’s House for so long and she knows where her suitcase is, that whenever she’s angry with us or simply wants to go, she will grab her suitcase and drop it in front us as if to say she wants to go. Now! We love how much she loves going to Jill’s House.

Charleigh is safe and happy at Jill’s House, and we can relax knowing that she is receiving such wonderful care!”

Thank you for making stories like Charleigh’s possible.

The Knowlton Family

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Meet Margot and Family

“To describe Margot in one word it would be, tenacious! She is a great friend, and a strong advocate for kids with special needs. She is sensitive to the needs of others and has such a great spirit! Margot was born with Down Syndrome and has always had to work extra hard to do simple things. But she is wonderfully tenacious.”

“Margot considers herself to be an average 15-year-old high schooler and she has a good group of friends. She has an older brother who will be going off to college in the fall, and a 4-year-old brother we adopted after fostering him when he was a baby. We know Margot sometimes feels left out, being a girl with special needs in the middle of her brothers, but she truly loves her family.”

“As a toddler we received in-home therapy support and the therapists would often come to the home with their bags of toys and treats. Margot quickly learned that bags were like a treasure chest! You never know what is inside. If we were at the beach or with other friends, she would often go through bags hoping to find something fun. She had such a light even as young toddler that her inquisitiveness wasn’t a bother! She has always been very curious of people”

“Now that Margot is 15 years old her curiosity has turned into compassion. Margot was crowned Miss Illinois Amazing Junior Teen and she will be going to Nationals in July. This is an advocacy event that empowers young women with special needs to speak up for themselves, to gain confidence, and to inspire others. Margot wants to be a writer when she grows up and has been doing a lot of writing. She also volunteers, does charity events, and advocacy work for kids with disabilities. We are so proud of her!”

“Margot has a great friend group of kids who have special needs and some who do not. Margot would say that she and her friend group are ‘Really cool!’ . They do typical teenage things like go to the movie theater, go to McDonald’s, or hang out at each other’s home. Though she has great time with her friends and her family, we also know that she needs something special and just for her. Margot’s special place is Jill’s House Windy City Camp!”

“We were so happy to learn about Jill’s House around 4 years ago. A friend of ours shared that she was working at the Windy City Camp. I had no idea this camp existed! We connected with the camp staff and immediately enrolled her.”

“Now that Margot has been going to camp for several years, she has developed some favorite things about camp. For starters, Margot considers herself a foodie and says the food is really good! She also loves having a camp buddy. But hands down, her most favorite thing about camp is the Talent Show. Margot will carefully prepare for the Talent Show. She plans what she will do and what props she will bring. She will sometimes dance or sing along to a favorite song.

“Camp has been so great for Margot! She knows a few of the girls who attend camp regularly, and she loves being able to spend time with other kids who have different special needs than herself. In our family with an older brother and a younger brother, camp is Margot’s special place where she gets her special attention. While Margot is at camp, we spend one on one time with our other kids. We are relaxed because we know that Margot is cared for. The nurses really show love and care for Margot, and that means so much to us. When we pick up Margot from camp, she chatters about her camp experiences for the first few minutes of the 90-minute car ride home. She will sing her favorite camp song, “Father’s House” and share about the talent show. But camp is also exhausting! It never takes long before she is fast asleep.”

“We are so grateful for Jill’s House and the Windy City Camp and providing Margot a place to be herself and feel special.”

Thank you for making stories like Margot’s possible.

The Hart Family

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Our older children range in age from 32-18, and after them comes our son, Peter, who is 11! Peter has Down syndrome, and once we learned all about the joys of Down syndrome, as well as the need for international adoption of children with disabilities; we became interested in pursuing that option as well. Here in the United States, there is a waiting list to adopt children with Down syndrome, but in other countries those children are often institutionalized. In Russia, at that time, children with Down syndrome were often sent to a psychiatric institution after the age of 5 or 6. That reality tore at our hearts. On top of that, Peter is much younger than his siblings, plus making friends requires lots of support, so we could see the value of a special inter-family friendship. It was a process that we started hesitatingly and prayerfully. Our agency happened to have a strong connection to China, so we eventually met our son Stephen through an assortment of little pictures and finally brought him home in 2014, which means he has been a part of our family nearly 7 years!

Peter and Stephen have grown up together! Stephen, who just turned 10, teaches Peter to be gentler, and Peter teaches Stephen to be more adventurous. Like Peter, Stephen has Down syndrome, and he has autism as well. He is almost completely non-verbal, although he can make noises to mean “Home” and “Mama”… we’re working on one for “Papa”, too!

When we adopted Stephen, we didn’t know his full range of disabilities, which we’ve definitely had to adapt to. However, God works in mysterious ways, and it has been a wonderful thing for both boys. While there are sometimes challenges, Peter and Stephen are such special blessings who bring much joy to our family.

The boys are little buddies, always playing together, inside and out. They are very different but have a lot of the same interests—which means they LOVE going to Jill’s House Blue Ridge Camp together! They’ve always gone together, which they really prefer. Their friendship is very sweet, which has been so important for each of them to have during the pandemic. We cannot even imagine what it would have been like for them to be on their own during this time.

On the flip side, our hands are full! We are so fortunate that Peter & Stephen have some older siblings to come in and out and help us, and of course we have Jill’s House as a huge help, too! But yes, as you can imagine, we fall asleep quickly at night!

The change that came with school when the pandemic hit was something huge to adapt to—it was a big challenge to supervise everything constantly. Zoom was hard for Peter and Stephen when everything first shut down. It was hard to keep sufficient structure initially, which is key for our sons.

The boys were planning on going to Blue Ridge Camp on March 13th 2020, the weekend that everything shut down! That was such a big heartbreak for us, that the world shut down on that particular weekend. That morning we had the boys’ bags packed and we thought that time at camp would be how they spent their weekend. We are SO glad to say that we have been able to come to Jill’s House Blue Ridge Camp since it reopened, which has been a joyful highlight for both the boys and for us.

Because he is nonverbal, Stephen has a speaking device. On it, he has a page of places, and we had to add Jill’s House Camp because he really wants to say it! When Stephen sees the Jill’s House logo, or wants to count down the days—because we do count down the days until time at Jill’s House! —he uses his speaking device to communicate his excitement and anticipation.

There are reports that come home each time Peter and Stephen have had a stay, and they read: “What we love about Peter” and “What we love about Stevie”—they are just beautiful. They warm a parent’s heart. Based on what these reports say, and what Peter has said, he loves the high swing! He has a very adventurous spirit and loves anything in the outdoors, so Blue Ridge Camp is perfect for him. Stevie loves board games, so he really enjoys playing those with the counselors out at camp, but he also enjoys new things, like hayrides. The counselors give them one-on-one attention and yet guide them to be a part of the group, which is so good for our boys.

Jill’s House is a place that we really have confidence—the staff are familiar with the disabilities that our children have, there is full understanding of the medical needs of our children, and the combination of fun and structure of Jill’s House is amazing. We are very fortunate that our boys are physically capable to go adventure around outside. We were stunned that there was a place that even existed like this, and the glowing recommendation of a friend is what drew us to it initially. She referred to it as “a spa for special needs children”—how accurate!

Jill’s House is such a unique operation. When we have told people in other places about Jill’s House, people who don’t have access to what we do through Jill’s House, they are amazed, because it’s hard to find programs like this. We are so grateful that we have such a wonderful thing—there really is nothing else like it. My husband, Chris, and I don’t have parents who are able to take the boys and care for them, and it’s helpful when an attendant comes to our home, but it is certainly nothing like what Jill’s House frees us up to do, including special events with our older children. It meant so much to our daughter that we drove up to her college to attend a parent’s event, were able to spend the night, and spend the next day with her—things we absolutely could not do without our boys staying overnight at Jill’s House Camp!

Thank you for seeing the beauty of our children. That is what is most touching. We view Jill’s House as faith in action in the most beautiful way—everyone invested in Jill’s House loves and cares for people who are so often on the periphery. Thank you for making this amazing opportunity possible for families like ours, here in Virginia and all around the country.

The Smith Family

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January 29  |  3 minute read

“Jessica and I are missionary kids from Southeast Asia and high school sweethearts! After getting married, we spent some time in Alaska—in fact, on our first Sunday at our church there, we announced that Jessica was pregnant! We had lost our firstborn shortly after she was born, so we were very excited about this next pregnancy. Lo and behold, our son Trevor came two weeks early that summer. 24 hours after he was born, he started turning blue, so we were medevaced off the island to a children’s hospital in Seattle. A few days later the doctors found out Trevor had Down syndrome, which was a complete shock to us. No one in our extended family was familiar with Down Syndrome in any way—so not only were we surprised, but we were also unequipped and very much alone.”

“Trevor has transformed our life in many ways and has given us a passion for the special needs community. A door opened when we heard whisperings about the Jill’s House Windy City camp. When we found out that was an option, we pursued it, hard. Once it opened, we were at the very first Windy City Camp weekend and have been at almost every camp since!

Respite opportunities are very hard to find—especially in Illinois. There is very little funding for it, especially in Illinois. Children who have special needs carry their own challenges, so that certainly impacts the options for someone to provide respite care. There is no other organization we know of that facilitates nights away like Jill’s House does. Jill’s House is tackling and pioneering a very challenging task, and for that we are very grateful.”

“It is a bigger ask to request family to stay with Trevor overnight and he doesn’t have friends that he goes to have sleepovers with. Knowing that we could send him away for a whole weekend, that he would have a total blast, and that we could do something together or take our other kids on special adventures was HUGE. It really is something that he looks forward to in a big way—he is such a huge fan of Jill’s House, and it is a very special privilege to have something so cool that he really loves. He has a great time, every time.

Trevor is very unique—I don’t think we’ve ever met a child with Down syndrome like Trevor. He is very high-functioning, very verbal, very involved in all parts of life, and is very athletic (he loves doing high intensity workouts!). Trevor loves to play his drums, he is deeply loyal to his high school (he is super proud to be a Tiger!), and absolutely loves movies. In fact, at Windy City Camp he will organize the entire Jill’s House staff into all the parts and characters of movies, and then they reenact the entire film, wearing costumes, as Trevor narrates!”

“Besides running camp like he is the prince there; Trevor tells us that his favorite things about camp are ‘his buddy and the s’mores’. The buddy he is paired with each weekend becomes his new best friend for life!

We had a nearly year-long break during the pandemic, but once Camp Windy City opened back up, Trevor was able to go again! He verbally expressed several times how much he missed Windy City Camp during that time.

Another thing that we are so grateful for about Windy City Camp is the staff: they are just fantastic to interact with. They are enthusiastic and professional and joyful all at once. The paperwork they do is proof that they are tracking Trevor so closely: an indicator of how intentional the staff try to be. Jill’s House does everything they can to make each weekend a special weekend.

At home, there is pressure on our other kids to include him, or on me to entertain him. While he is having his own weekend adventure at Windy City, we can all relax. We don’t have the added level of “Well, what’s Trevor going to do? How is he going to engage?” We miss him when he’s gone, we are always ready to have him back, and we love hearing about his fun times at camp, but it is very lovely to just have that brief time of relief from the ongoing stress and tension we feel each day.”

“Churches are often looking to bless families like ours. They have big hearts, they are well-intentioned, but the ways they are typically able to help is not what we truly need at the core. They will do a big Saturday morning activity or show a movie for families affected by disability. But that limited time is not true respite. What our family really needs is a weekend off. That is too hard for a church to pull off without the help of a place like Jill’s House.

That being said, Trevor has gone to a full week-long camp before. He had the time of his life, but he was out of his routine, and we ended up doing damage control at the end of it. For that reason, a weekend is a very reasonable amount of time to entrust others to care for Trevor. Jill’s House is not long enough that things will get overlooked, but long enough that we all get that true respite: Windy City Camp is the perfect amount of time for Trevor and for us.

Unless you have a child with special needs and live the day-to-day underlying stress that that places on a family, and then feel the relief when that is taken away temporarily, I think it would be hard to understand exactly how amazing Jill’s House is for a family like ours. All we can say is a huge thank you to you for making this opportunity possible and accessible for us and for Trevor.”