Our Girls
Elliana's Story
Home from Armenia in 2017.
The girl in the background
In 2015 Kristie told Phil that if we were going to adopt, we should do it soon. Through Reece’s Rainbow we found a girl in Armenia and started the process to adopt her. In photo after photo of her, we kept noticing the same sweet face in the background, a little girl listed as “Olivia.”
An Italian couple adopted the first girl before we could. Phil told Kristie that maybe God had shown us the first girl so we would see the second.
That second girl is our Elliana.
A new kind of normal
“Olivia” used a wheelchair and had real medical needs. Kristie, who would carry most of her care, wrestled with whether she could handle it. We called a mom from our church whose son also uses a wheelchair and asked what their life was like. She told us she was on her way to Qatar for her son’s wheelchair race.
What we took from that conversation: it becomes your new normal faster than you would think. She was right.
Home in 2017
In 2017 we brought her home from Armenia, our fourth child. Her big siblings, Kara, Ethan, and Owen, helped a lot with her adoption and her homecoming. She just fit right in, and everybody loved her.
Elliana today
Elliana is in sixth grade: outgoing, funny, and social. She gets the rock-star treatment everywhere she goes.