The fact that we have our two sons is sort of a pair of miracles. After our marriage in 1974, we didn’t worry about having children for several years, but then as Dale entered her late 30s we focused on trying. The first miracle is that God had brought a neighbor next door in 1981. He was Hilton Kort, who had just finished a residency at Yale Medical School and come to Atlanta to open a practice in infertility OB-GYN. He was in the first class trained in in vitro fertilization by the doctor who developed the procedure in London. He and his wife Phillipa became close friends. Dale went to him for help in conceiving and he performed an operation to help with our hopes of pregnancy. After several steps he told us natural childbirth was unlikely and we should consider adoption. We talked it over and told Hilton we were interested in adopting. We did nothing else, no contacting agencies, etc. A few months we received a call from an attorney that worked with Hilton who told us Hilton knew of a baby that would be given up for adoption by a young girl who wanted the adopting parents to be practicing Roman Catholics and wanted us to have this opportunity. We went to the attorneys office on September 11, 1986, two days after Bill was born, to receive him. We never took any action to obtain another child, believing God had granted us a supreme gift and that we should be satisfied with Bill. Out of the blue we received a call from the same attorney about five years later to tell us another young girl was going to give her baby up and also wished the baby to be adopted by Catholic parents. We went to the attorney’s office in 1992 to receive Mike who had been born two days before. We had the attorney give Mike to Bill. What we learned later was that Mike’s birth mother had been going to a Catholic Charities support group for unwed mothers. She befriended a young woman who was there to give support and asked if she knew an attorney she could contact to arrange a private adoption. The woman she asked was Bill’s birth mother. She had given us Bill, gone on with life, gotten married and had children of her own. Thus, Bill’s birth mother gave us Mike’s birth mother and Mike. Miracles do happen.
