She was born without arms. Thirteen years later, she shocked the doctors. A sporty 13-year-old girl from Michigan, who is born with no arms, hasn’t let her disability stop her from playing soccer, doing karate, dancing, and even joining a baseball team....CONTINUE READING
Zoe Bosonic was born with a condition called bilateral upper extremity Amelia, which meant she was born with no right arm and her left arm ending in a nub above her elbow.
But the determined tween doesn’t let that stop her, and she’s constantly impressing her parents and older siblings. Born in China, Zoe was adopted as a toddler by Brian and Carrie from Dewitt, Michigan.
The Bosonic family, who had already adopted one of their two other children, weren’t planning on adopting more. But once Carrie saw Zoe’s photo, she immediately fell in love.
“I saw Zoe’s picture and I just fell in love with her, and I started writing letters that night to the adoption agency,” she said. Due to her condition, Zoe initially struggled to stand up when she came to live with Brian and Carrie.
“When we first brought her home, she was falling a lot because she didn’t have good balance,” said Carrie, who took her to her first sport, gymnastics, to help her with her balance issues and teach her how to fall safely.
Zoe quickly overcame her limitations. “Because she doesn’t have the use of hands, she finds creative ways to get things done. She often grips things with her toes, using her feet to eat, and just as most people wash their hands before eating, she makes sure she cleans her feet.
From helping her mom in the kitchen to brushing her hair, there are hardly any limits to what Zoe can do without arms. It humbles you to watch her do things, and you don’t know how she’s going to do it, but she finds a way to do it,” her father told BTV.
Nowadays, Zoe is practicing four sports and competing in three of them. “I play four sports: karate, dance, baseball, and soccer,” Zoe explained. She does karate, dance, and soccer competitively.
Her mother still remembers the first day she ever tried playing baseball. “Zoe holds a bat between her cheek and her shoulder and swings her whole body. The first day that she played, there were a lot of people in the audience that were teary-eyed watching her play. She was so little and just so amazing,” said her mom.
Currently, Zoe’s favorite sport is karate. “Because I like kicking and I’m good at it,” her siblings say she always had the drive to achieve whatever she wanted to.
“She’s definitely got the personality type to be so good at everything she does. I won’t lie; it makes me jealous a little bit because she’s amazing at sports that I can’t even do,” her sister Taylor admitted.
“There’s times that I forget that there’s anything different about her,” she added. “She just happens to not have arms. I’m musical, sassy, and determined,” Zoe said. Unfortunately, when Zoe is out in public, she often gets stared at.
“Just walking around, I’ll notice people are staring or pointing. We’ve even had people just come up and touch her; it’s strange,” Taylor said.
“Some people yell, ‘What’s wrong with her?’” said Zoe, “But I usually ignore them. If we go to the grocery store, there’s inevitably one little kid who’s in the store in their shopping cart, and they point and say, ‘Mom, look at that little girl, she doesn’t have any arms,’” Carrie added.
The family remembers one particularly upsetting experience in a restaurant. “This girl was filming Zoe eating,” said Taylor.
“I did stand up for her because I really don’t think that’s appropriate, filming anyone without their consent,” but Carrie added, Zoe often brushes it off. “She doesn’t worry too much about what other people think,” she said. “She’s always really taken everything in her stride.”
Although Zoe is very independent, she does receive some help from her specially trained dog, Moi. “Moi helps me at school by carrying stuff and bringing stuff to me, and at home, Moi helps me with getting stuff out of the fridge and getting papers for me,” Zoe said.
When asked about Zoe’s future, her parents don’t see any limits to what she can achieve. “She can pretty much do anything she wants. I don’t see anything really holding her back.
Whatever she wants to do, she sets her mind to it, and she’ll find a way to do it and be successful at it,” Brian said. Zoe’s brother Tai added that she often offers to help Zoe, but his little sister will shrug her off.
“Not a day goes by when I’m not super proud of her,” said Taylor.
Another amazing story, Davia Walker, wants to be famous. She would love to star on the Disney Channel. If that doesn’t work out, the 12-year-old, who prefers to be called by her nickname, Angel, has a backup plan to be a surgeon.
Angel is just your average sixth-grade girl who likes to play soccer and text her friends and is always yelling at her brothers to stay out of her room.
The difference is that she does all of that with her feet. Angel was born without arms. “I show other people that I can do what they can do with their hands, and they’re just amazed by it,” Walker said.
“I don’t let it bother me anymore because now that I’m older, I’m just like everyone else, just with my feet,” Angel still evokes stares from strangers, but what comes off as strange to some is the norm for her. She was born to Tissa Bowers with a pair of shoulders but no arms, and that birth defect hasn’t slowed her down.
She has two brothers, Ad Darius Phillips, 7, and Donovan Walker, 13. Donovan said Angel never lets anyone play the family’s Nintendo. “We all fight over who gets to play, but she always wins,” he said.
Darius talks about the time he begged his big sister to pull out one of his loose teeth. After some resistance, Angel obliged and pulled out his tooth with her toes.
“He was bothering me, saying my tooth hurts, can you pull it out? And I kept saying no,” she said. “I didn’t want to touch him with my feet, so I put a napkin on my foot and then put my foot in his mouth. Ew!” And pulled it out.
Angel is keenly aware that she’s different, but it’s not a bad thing. “It’s something that I have, something special about me,” she says. Her positivity and independence help make her life as normal as any other. “She’s very positive. She holds her head up high.
She’s very positive about everything, and she’s very confident,” Dean said. “She’s just like everybody else. Everybody treats her like everybody else, and they don’t even realize that she doesn’t have arms.”
Angel and her mother differ on the age at which Angel became aware of and somewhat comfortable with her appearance. Bowers said it was about 3 to four years old, but Angel said she was seven or eight before she started…CONTINUE READING>>
