Angel Stories

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this……

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away…because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But…if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.

Submission by The Moore Family 2008
- A Year of "Firsts"

I am writing this letter to say thank you to the waiting child team at GWCA.  I encourage all parents to consider a waiting child.  They are just as wonderful if not more than a "non waiting child".  Our daughter was the smartest and most social child in our travel group of 10 families.  We were the only waiting child family in that travel group and we saw the families go from being apprehensive of our SN daughter to eventually envious of our cutie pie's smartness, social skills, and friendly attitude, that out shown all their non-special needs kids. Often special needs kids are better taken care of in smaller settings than non-special needs kids.

Here are some before and after pics of our daughter from her lip and nose surgeries. One pic is of her Gotcha day, and the second is at a wedding in November after her repairs. Zaina Jones is our daughter's name and her Gotcha date is September 10th, 2008.