It all started with Mary, now 12, the caregiver. Then came Alex, 10, a preemie who never stopped growing. Next Niki, 16, the helper, joined the family.
Then came Nyron, 10, a typical boy who enjoys his video games. Then Vladimir, 7, whose smile can light up a room, followed. Finally, there were Nadine, 5, and Emmanuel, 3, who both left their devastated country behind.
They come from different places — as close as a county away, and as far as Serbia and Haiti. Some have special needs, but they had one thing in common: All were in need of a good home, and a family to call their own.
They found that with Frank and Diane Elliott, of Boalsburg. A decade ago the Elliotts were a couple who wanted children. Today they’re the heads of a household that includes seven children, three cats and a dog.
Soon, it will grow again, to include an 8-year-old boy from Bulgaria.
Deciding to adopt
Frank, a hairdresser, met Diane, a pediatric nurse, at a ballroom dance class at the State College YMCA and they were married in 1992. After raising two boys in a previous marriage, Frank thought he was “done with all that,” but when their relationship became serious, he revisited the idea of fatherhood.
But the couple had difficulty conceiving, and found themselves faced with a few choices, including in vitro fertilization and adoption. All would likely be expensive.
For Diane, it was simple. “We can spend $10,000 or $20,000 for a maybe, or we can spend it on a sure thing,” she remembers thinking. With that, the couple plunged into the world of adoption in 1999.
“I said we could have a couple more kids, but I never imagined eight,” Frank said recently. “We’ve grown into it and it has become something that we do.”
Centre County Judge Pamela A. Ruest, then a lawyer, got to know the Elliotts as a customer of Frank’s. They became her clients, as she helped them navigate the legalities of their first adoption.
“They always talked about adopting lots of kids,” Ruest said. “They’re just compassionate and wonderful people.”
After she was elected judge, Ruest officiated at the couple’s second adoption, and at each one since.
“All the children get along well, you don’t even notice their disabilities,” Ruest said. “They’re so integrated into the whole family.”
A growing family
Mary, an infant from Mobile, Ala., was their first child. The Elliotts entered into an open adoption with her birth parents, which allows them to stay in touch with her birth family, particularly with Mary’s grandmother.
The relationship helped shape the Elliotts’ approach to adoption. Diane said that during the process, “all the sudden it just hit me and I thought ‘Why does it have to be a secret?’ ”
A year later, the Elliotts got a phone call from an adoption agency looking for a home for Alex, who was born premature at almost 3 months early.
“We really hadn’t talked about adopting more. ... But we were sitting here, we had just bought this house — the house was perfect — but I thought ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so big,’ ” Diane said.
Alex has a few learning disabilities but has grown into a happy, healthy 10- year-old.
With two toddlers under their care, less than a year later the Elliotts undertook a new adventure: adopting a local 6-year-old girl named Niki. The girl had eye cancer, an experience with which Diane could empathize.
“She had cancer in her eye and I had had cancer in my eye. ... I thought ‘I know how to navigate the system, I mean, I’m a pediatric nurse,’ ... so I said yeah.”
The transition wasn’t easy. Niki also has some learning disabilities and some “attachment issues,” Diane said. She acted out at first, but the Elliotts were confident she just needed attention and stability.
“She didn’t know what strawberries were, she didn’t know what giraffes were,” Diane said.
That soon changed. Today, older sister Niki “likes to remind people that she taught (Alex) to walk,” Diane said.
The Elliotts waited about three years before considering the next addition to their family: a 4-year-old boy for Alex to play with.
They considered a dozen boys who needed homes, but Nyron stood out. He had been severely burned as an infant and both his feet had been amputated and has had to get several surgeries as he gets older. This, the Elliotts thought, was a child who could benefit from Diane’s pediatric nursing skills.
Diane remembers telling Frank: “Look at this little boy, he doesn’t have any feet ... you know we could get that kid and we could teach him to dance. He could do whatever he wanted to. And my husband said, ‘Get him.’ ”
Today the couple often receives emails about children who need homes, and must turn most of them down.
“It’s like anything else you’re interested in,” Diane said. “If you’re interested in cars, you get emails about cars. Well, we always get emails about kids.”
But one suggestion that found its way to the Elliotts’ inbox caught their attention. It was about a boy in a Serbian orphanage. That child was quickly adopted, but the orphanage suggested the Elliotts consider Vladimir, a 4-year-old boy who they considered “unadoptable” because he was born without eyes and has severe developmental delays.
“I really did think, ‘Oh my gosh, a blind child, can we do this?’ ” Diane said, but “Frank said, ‘Well, I’m not scared.’ And I said ‘All right, well, if you’re not scared, I guess I won’t be.’ ”
There’s “always one particular thing that will sell you on a kid,” Frank said.
In this instance, it was an email from a worker at the orphanage. She was answering some of Diane’s questions, and wrote that while Vlad slept very well, she didn’t know how he acted around other children.
He’d never played with any.
When the Elliotts first met Vlad he had the developmental capacity of a 6- month-old, Frank said. That was a few years ago. Now, with the many types of therapy and assistance available in the State College area, Vlad is able to participate in school and recently graduated from kindergarten.
“It’s kind of like we turned an ‘on’ switch,” Frank said.
“It shows what can happen with a child who goes from an environment of abandonment to a nurturing home,” said Denise Bierly, a State College attorney who has been helping the Elliotts with their adoptions for the past 10 years. She’s also president-elect of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys.
Today, the whole family, especially Niki, makes sure to always include Vlad. He’s blind and doesn’t speak much, but he uses a walker to get around and is learning how to use some adapted sign language signals and gestures to communicate his needs, such as hunger and needing a diaper change, to his family.
“We have two rules,” Diane said. “The first one is ‘No sad Vlads,’ and the second is usually wherever the kids go, we always make sure that Vladdy’s around.”
The two youngest children, Nadine and Emmanuel, have been part of the Elliott family for a little more than a year.
The Elliotts had already finished the paperwork to adopt them from Haiti, but the difficult process became more urgent after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that devastated the country.
After what seemed to be an insurmountable volume of additional paperwork and phone calls, the Elliotts got word that the children would be put on a flight out of Haiti. Diane and a friend flew to Florida to meet them.
“There was no Kodak moment, you know, there was no transition,” Diane said. “They just threw them in this room with me.”
Neither child spoke English. Diane’s only knowledge of French was “from Estee Lauder commercials.” But they made it work with a French-English dictionary. The children arrived malnourished and underweight, but today are both healthy and speak English fluently.
“The kids from Haiti, when they first came, they didn’t like junk food or sweets or TV, but I’m making Americans out of them — now they’re hooked on Dora,” Diane said jokingly.
Now the Elliotts are waiting for word, expected within the next month or two, that they can bring their eighth child, Nikolay, home from a Bulgarian orphanage.
Family first
While it takes more than love to raise a large family, the Elliotts said they’ve found the secret to making it work: “The kids are the center of the whole thing,” Frank said, “and everything is designed around the whole thing.”
Diane works part time as a maternal/child clinical educator at Mount Nittany Medical Center. Frank spent 10 years working for Penn State while earning his doctorate in workforce education and development. He enjoyed the work, but to continue in that field, he realized he would have to relocate his family — something he didn’t want to do, given the instability that had marked much of his children’s lives.
So three years ago, he returned to his first love: hairdressing. He opened a salon in the family’s home, and wrote a book, “The Other Side of Hairdressing.” He also does some consulting.
Diane wholeheartedly supported his decision.
“We could go someplace else and we could both make a lot more money,” she said. “But my kids have no idea how lucky they are to live in Boalsburg ... they don’t even really know what prejudice is.”
Kathy Kalinosky, founder of local adoption support group Freedom Bridge, met the Elliott family years ago while picnicking on the Penn State HUB-Robeson Center lawn during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.
Kalinosky, who has adopted four biracial children herself, said she “saw this couple with this little bitty black boy and I just couldn’t take my eyes off them.”
The families, sitting on blankets next to each other, struck up a conversation about adoption and have been friends ever since, getting together on weekends and sharing baby-sitting duties.
“Diane and Frank are extraordinary, extraordinary people,” Kalinosky said. “Our criteria for adopting was super narrow. Diane and Frank’s were super wide.”
Both the Elliott and Kalinosky families have found State College to be a great place to raise a multiracial family.
“It’s one of the reasons we moved here,” Kalinosky said. “People are much more accepting.”
Diane also noted the amount of adoption and special needs resources in the area.
Four of her children, Nyron, Vlad, Nadine and Manny, have attended or are enrolled in Easter Seals, an organization that provides services to individuals with physical disabilities and developmental delays.
The Elliotts “not only introduce the children into a new society sometimes, but integrate them into their family and into the community,” said Easter Seals Director Kathleen Zdenek. “They really embody our mission in a big way.”
The family has itself become a local adoption resource, Bierly said.
They are a “blessing to the adoption community here,” she said. When someone has a question, “not only will (Diane) accept their call, she invites them to dinner.”
Finding a balance
Money can be tight at times, but the family finds ways to cut costs and has been helped many times by the kindness of others. In addition, many adopted children receive monthly government stipends to assist families with the child’s cost of living and reimburse them for the expense of
adoption requirements, Diane said.
“Honest to goodness, clothes are (practically) free in this town,” she said. “... No it doesn’t all match — but it really does not cost a lot of money.”
Diane spends a lot of time reading books about organization and saving money and has worked to find a balance between her job and spending time with her children.
“I did decide a long time ago I was never going to let money stand in my way,” she said. “I always tell people I pay on my house, I pay on my car and I pay on my kids. Where do you think I get the biggest return in my investment?”
In general, though, “I’ve never heard of anyone wanting to do it and the money not coming through,” Diane said of adoption. “Money-wise, really, stuff always works out.”
One day, when the kids are older, Diane said she’d like to work with 17-yearolds who are close to aging out of the foster care system.
“I’ll tell them, ‘If you want a place to come at Christmas, a last name and a place to call home, I’m in. If you really want a family, you come on over and we’ll be it,’ ” she said.
Frank said that’s just the way Diane works.
“Her whole life has been helping kids,” he said “... Tell Diane you have a kid that really needs help, and she’s there.”
