A Little About Us


My name is Amelia Avila. I began this site as a project for my web page design class, taught by Professor Peggy McKelvey, at Northern Virginia Community College. Since I have a daughter with Cystic Fibrosis (CF), I thought this project would be the perfect opportunity to create a site devoted to creating awareness of what it's like for families affected by CF.

What can I tell you about us? Well, as my husband likes to tell people, "We have eight kids, and they're all boys except for seven of them." Sometimes people have to think about that for a minute. We are a pretty normal family, facing each day as it comes, just like everyone else. We are retired military living in Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Additionally, we are a homeschool family, meaning that the world is our classroom and we aren't bound by time when it comes to learning things. The kids are doing what kids do, growing up, going to college, getting married and having children of their own. Currently, my husband and I have three grandchildren (granddaughters), with two more grandchildren due in late summer (2013). Maybe one of them will be a boy... we shall see!

Our daughter, Elena, is the only one in the family who actually has Cystic Fibrosis. We don't know of anyone else in the genetic line who had CF. There have been stories, though. My father's uncle had several children who passed away early in life. My mother-in-law had two siblings who died of pneumonia in the same year. My uncle had countless surgeries for bowel blockages, and had several bouts of pneumonia. None of them were documented cases of CF, but certainly arouse suspicion. All of our other children who have been genetically tested are carriers. They haven't all had the genetic screening, though, so there might be a couple of them who are not carriers at all. Since CF is a recessive gene, my husband and I are both carriers, too, though we've never been tested genetically to verify that.

Currently, we are waiting for Elena to be granted her wish for a trip through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. She had originally wanted to meet Justin Bieber, but the wait for that has been super long, so she recently changed her wish to be some kind of family trip. We'll keep you updated on that, and once we do the trip, I will post pictures!