Alumni Creators Kelli ’05 and Trey ’05 Ingram

Kelli, social studies education major/Trey, sociology major, business administration, psychology, and religion minors
Social Media Influencer and Attorney/Business Owner

How it started
Trey and I were in a math class together freshman year but didn’t have another class together until the summer before our senior year. It was a psychology class that met during the summer for two weeks where we studied the effects of abandonment on orphans. Then we traveled as a group to Romania to minister to and learn more about orphans. What we saw there was unforgettable and honestly, life changing for us. The conditions that those babies and children lived in were horrific, and it was painful to see it and just leave them there living like that. That trip ended up showing us our callings in more ways than one.

We both knew

1. We wanted to marry each other!
2. We wanted to be involved in foster care and adoption in some way as a married couple.
3. Trey wanted to apply to law school so that he could help people adopt children.

In those 10 days, Trey and I fell in love, came home, went shopping for engagement rings and got engaged a month later. We planned our wedding during our senior year and were married the weekend after graduation. We will celebrate 20 wonderful years of marriage this May!

We have eight children, six by birth and two through adoption, and we’re thrilled to be expecting our ninth this summer!

Funny fact, one of the professors who was on the trip with us threatened to give both of us failing grades for the class once we were home because we apparently broke the “no dating relationships” on the trip policy. In the end, I think we both got As.

Social media presence
It’s been so fun to have a platform to promote Jesus, marriage, and motherhood. I’ve had an online presence ever since our first child was born back in 2009, and then it was more blogging. Then Instagram got big, and I just slowly grew my following to where it is today. I think it’s important to show that happy, healthy, thriving families with a lot of kids can exist. We really want to be a light and bring a positive message to the culture. There’s a lot of dark, depressing, and degrading content out there so we like to counteract that by sharing the hope we have in Jesus. We are very prolife, profamily, promarriage and preadoption, and those are the main messages in our content.

My Instagram is also a great blessing to our family monetarily as well. I share many of the products we use, clothes we wear, gift guides that I create, and I make commissions when followers buy those products. I also get to work with different brands who pay me to promote their products. I’m pretty picky about who I choose to partner with and only promote things I love and think my audience will love, too. It’s a lot of work, but I really do love creating content, and I love that it’s something I can do from home while being with my children!

Handling the brutal
It’s been very eye opening to say the least. I never realized how many people hate large families and don’t see the blessing of children. When my account really started growing and my videos were going viral, I dealt with a lot of hateful comments and dms, and honestly, I still do every day, but it has given me a very unique perspective and it’s one that I share with my children all the time. “Hurt people hurt people” and when many of these people see a genuinely happy family on the internet, they don’t know how to handle it. They’re wallowing so deeply in their own pain that the only thing that makes them feel a little better is to put others down. It’s true, maybe some just really don’t like my outlook or my content and that’s totally fine, but the majority of them are hurting people who need Jesus. My skin has gotten so much thicker these past few years, and I’ve learned to not let it bother me, which is such a blessing!

Protecting our children
Our children do not have social media accounts, but they are very present in my content. They don’t use or scroll any social media apps. We just don’t see any value in it at their ages (15 down to 3). It’s hard enough to process it all in a healthy way as a grown adult, and there’s no way a young teen or child can sift through all the terrible content that’s out there. We want to protect them for as long as possible. I’m very careful with what I share about them and have probably become even more private as they’ve gotten older. I want to respect their privacy and not share intimate details about their lives with hundreds of thousands, at times millions, of people.

The beautiful
I get messages every day from people encouraging me and thanking me, and it’s so incredible! My favorite messages are when women tell me that they decided to have another baby, or they are going to start the adoption process after hearing our story. That always just spurs me on to keep doing what I’m doing!

Advocating for South Carolina children
Trey has been very instrumental in helping children in foster care in the state of South Carolina. He worked on multiple bills over the years that have been signed into law by former Gov. Nikki Haley and Gov. Henry McMaster. Perhaps the most impactful was a law that allows a parent who loses temporary custody of their children to the Department of Social Services the ability to still choose adoption for their child by someone other than DSS. He has also helped change SC laws to (i) clarify who can adopt in SC, (ii) increase the size a foster family is allowed to be, and (iii) expand the authority of the foster parent.

He is primarily a business owner, co-owning a real estate closing firm that operates all over the state, but he also loves to help families finalize adoptions in court. Seeing children achieve permanency with a loving family brings him great joy, and he is honored to get to play a role.