Stephanie Skehan with her twin daughters, Ariel and Charlotte, and her husband, Ben, in Sedona, July 2022.
When parents seek out a child care provider, they want someone who genuinely cares for their children and will even go that extra step to ensure the family is comfortable. Kids Incorporated Learning Center, or Kids Inc., is a DES-contracted child care provider located in Queen Creek that not only provides exceptional care to approximately 320 children, but helps families during challenging times as well.
Stephanie Skehan and her family, who enrolled twin daughters Ariel and Charlotte with Kids Inc. around its opening in early 2019, endured a great challenge in which the child care provider significantly assisted the family.
That challenge: Stephanie’s Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
“I had gotten COVID at the end of 2020, and I always had a cough and people always asked, ‘Hey, are you doing OK?’ and I’d say I was fine,” Stephanie admitted. “Finally I got it looked at. It was Friday when I was sent to the ER and I found out I had a mass in my chest. It happened to be Mother’s Day weekend, and they kept me in the hospital over the weekend and I got released when they did a biopsy.”
The biopsy confirmed the bad news, and three weeks later, Stephanie would start her cancer treatment.
“Usually, [my kids] would just go [to child care] two days a week, but with my chemotherapy I was so sick the day after, so they would go an extra day just so I could recuperate, and Kids Inc. would always check on me, see if I needed anything,” said Stephanie. “They would always give special attention to the girls. Let us drop them off a little early, pick them up a little late.”
Kimmie Foust, Director of Kids Inc., was one of the staff members who helped Stephanie and the twins, who have a special place within the center as they were Kids Inc.'s first pair of twin infants.
“We learned that mom (Stephanie) got diagnosed with cancer, and they were working through that,” said Kimmie. “So we were all just pitching in and just made sure that anytime mom needed them here, we discounted their rate as well because mom wasn’t able to work. We were able to give them a pretty good discount for two kiddos to keep them here at the center so mom could go get chemo and not have her worry about daycare and how they were going to watch the kids.”
In October 2020, just five months after her diagnosis and six treatments later, Stephanie was cancer-free. She is thankful for everything Kids Inc. provided her and her family, from the discounted rates, to walking her children out to her vehicle so she didn’t have to walk inside.
When Stephanie experienced another health scare in 2022, Kids Inc. was there for the Skehan twins and made sure to alleviate the pressure of needing child care once more.
Throughout Stephanie’s illness and recovery, Kids Inc., whom she still entrusts with the “OG (original) Twins” as they are called, made sure that child care would be the last of her concerns.
“We celebrated her when she went into remission and could go back to work, and they’ve been such an amazing family to have,” said Kimmie. “Stephanie is a very strong person and it was amazing to see her conquer cancer.”
To view more information on child care, visit the DES Division of Child Care.