Quinn & Morgan's Story
By Josh & Heather O
The journey to adoption for our family is both very similar to, and very different from, many other families who have followed this path. In late-1998/early-1999, after trying for several years to get pregnant, we found out that it would be difficult, if not impossible to conceive on our own. Following the pain of that news were several agonizing months in which we tried, unsuccessfully, to conceive through artificial insemination. Desperately wanting to start our family, we then turned to Wide Horizons for Children and adoption.
In January, 2001, we attended an adoption information meeting in Bedford, NH. We decided to pursue international adoption through the Korea program, and began the home study process in April. While initially very nervous about the interview process, our social worker always put us very much at ease. By June, our home study was complete and it came time to wait. And wait. And wait. In December, we received the greatest Christmas present ever – the news that we would finally have what we had so long hoped for: our referral and the first pictures of our child! I don’t think we stopped smiling for about two weeks after that, and we quickly rushed out to make copies of the pictures for desks at work. Then began the surreal waiting game – the period after which the referral is received and before the child comes home. We so looked forward to the monthly updates on "Quinn’s" health, and worried like "real" parents when we found out he had been sick – thankfully nothing serious. Then, on a Monday morning in April, we received “the call”…Quinn was coming home – FRIDAY! So much for the two weeks notice we had been told about. That was both the longest and the shortest week of our lives; long because we couldn’t wait for him to come home, and short because we realized, after everything we had been through, we were still woefully unprepared! We arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport about four hours early (just in case!) and paced nervously, waiting for the hours to pass. Finally the plane arrived, and we knew him as soon as we saw him! Words cannot express the joy and love that we felt for a child we had only just met (much more than the joy and love he felt for his car seat on the trip home to Rochester, New Hampshire!). Our dreams had come true in the person of this beautiful little boy, and though he really hated sleeping, he was perfect.
This should be enough to end this story, this happy journey to adoption. However, this was not the end of the story. It turns out our journey was not yet complete, for something funny happened on the way to the fertility doctor in June, 2003. (We had decided that we wanted another child and were looking at in vitro.) We received, out of the blue, a phone call from Wide Horizons – a call that we were not anticipating because so rarely does anything like this happen. On June 23, a child was born, a girl, who just happened to be a full biological sibling to Quinn. "Can you take her?" they asked. Can we take her? Of course we can take her! And while we wondered privately how we would take care of the financial obligations, we knew, deep down, that if God had thought to provide us this wonderful gift, He, too, would provide us with the answers. On December 1, 2003, Morgan came home, once again to Logan Airport, though she wasn’t as pleased to see us as Quinn was! Her fears seemed somewhat alleviated when she saw her brother for the first time the next morning, and the two have been the best of friends (most of the time!) ever since.
Today, Quinn is almost six and beginning kindergarten and Morgan just turned four. We are committed to keeping strong ties to their heritage by enrolling them in a small Tae Kwon Do school and enrolling them in Korean language classes. They are such happy, and funny, and smart, and silly kids, and they have made our lives so much more than before they came home. We are a complete family, and we owe so much to everyone at Wide Horizons for helping us on the way. We never could have dreamed that these two wonderful children could show us how much we were missing.