Utah Valley Quilt Guild       

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Family #4   2022

-two-parent household with 4 children

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The Fernandez Family Kimberlee and Adan Fernandez, like all parents, want to provide the best home they can for their children. Not only a home that offers safety, security, and stability for their four daughters, but one that also provides accessibility for their 14-year-old with cerebral palsy, Adalee.

 

The Fernandez family loves to spend time together, whether they are day-tripping or camping. Adan works in the HVAC field, and Kim is a part-time elementary school librarian. Until COVID, she also taught dance to children at a small studio. Kim said that their oldest daughter, Emma (17 years), cares for Adalee almost as much as her. She is also “super responsible,” a straight-A student, cheerleader, and on the student council.

 

Adalee loves using tablets to communicate with the family and watch YouTube. She loves to read and adores all things Harry Potter. She always stays busy and loves to go places with her family, especially out to eat. Mindee (9 years) is also helpful with Adalee. She loves to dance, play with her friends, and create art. She says that when she grows up, she wants to help people like her sister, Adalee. The youngest daughter, Kayla (6 years), is the “spitfire” of the family. She loves dancing and tumbling but also cuddling with her parents and the family dogs. She almost always has a smile on her face, Kim said.

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The Fernandez family owns a small, modest home in Orem. The house, built in 1955, needs significant repairs. More importantly, the home needs to be accessible for Adalee, who uses a wheelchair, cannot speak, and has limited use of her arms but is cognitively a 14-year-old who desires independence like any other teenager. The home is inadequate in almost every way. The makeshift plywood ramp leading to the front door needs to be replaced every year, and there is a one-inch lip that precludes her wheelchair from entering the house. In addition, none of the doorways in the home are wide enough for her wheelchair, so Adalee must crawl everywhere in the home. Crawling creates extremely calloused knees, and she wears through at least a pair of pants a month. The bathroom is a considerable challenge for Adalee and her parents. Not only is the doorway too narrow for her wheelchair, but the toilet and shower are also not accessible, leaving Kim and Adan to have to lift her 120 lb body every time she needs to shower or use the bathroom. The small bathroom barely has room for two people, let alone three. And at 120 lbs, Kim is finding that she cannot lift her daughter for much longer.

 

Adalee’s favorite activity is to bounce on the trampoline in the backyard. Because there is no accessible way to access the backyard, she must wait for her father to get home from work and carry her out. Kim and Adan have long accepted that their daughter will live with them for the rest of their lives. But, they do not want to move from their Orem neighborhood because of the proximity of the Fernandez family’s grandparents, who provides support and emergency response babysitting for the other three children. Due to the lack of accessibility, age, and critical infrastructure issues inside and outside of the home, it is more cost-effective to level this home and build an ADA-accessible home in its place. Kim said, “Having a home for Adalee that will allow her independence is so crucial to not only her but the whole family. This life is hard. Anything that will make it easier is welcome.” Habitat for Humanity of Utah County will raze the Fernandez home in early 2022 and build a home that will meet the needs of Adalee and her family now and for decades to come.