Reece’s Rainbow Report #65: Handl Family

What was that? Maybe her mind, exhausted from not returning until 1 a.m., was darting between dreamland and earth. 

She got up to investigate, heading immediately to the bedroom of Jack, her new son. The six-year-old was sitting on his toddler bed, wide-eyed in wonder as he absorbed his surroundings for the first time. 

And he was giggling. The magical sound that had woken the new mother had been pure laughter, straight from the voice — and heart — of a child who had until that point been rejected for having Down syndrome, not chosen for it. 

“I cried,” Handl admitted. “Having him come home, you see everything in a new light, especially with Jack and where he came from.” 

Where he came from was Latvia, a former Soviet territory that sees only 10-15 babies born with Down syndrome each year. It had been a long, 22-month slog to get there for Handl. First, an erupting Icelandic volcano prevented the certified nursing assistant from even getting on the plane to Latvia for three weeks. Then, once the first trip was finally completed in the spring of 2010, Handl almost got stranded in Germany because of the volcanic ash cloud that drifted eastward. 

From there, the Latvian court system took a summer break. Handl went back for the country’s required second trip in September and the final trip in October to bring Jack home. 

It was all worth it, however, when she heard that peal of laughter. 

“Until I saw Jack, I never thought I would have kids, and that I would just be the fun aunt,” says Handl, a 47-year-old single mother. “Before him, I worked, went out with friends and had the random single person life. But he’s the light of my life now, and I can’t imagine things without him anymore.” 

Blame it on the big sister. Kelly Schultz and her husband have adopted several children through Reece’s Rainbow, giving Handl a front-row seat to what international special needs adoption really looks like. 

“Let’s just see what countries you could adopt from as a single mother,” Schultz said one day. They did, finding Latvia, and then “Andrejs,” a tow-headed twin whose healthy sister had gone home with the biological family, leaving him to an orphanage. The sight of Jack, with no mama to walk him through his primary diagnosis plus a tumor on his chest, was “like a sucker punch from God.” 

“I don’t know,” Handl says. “There was just a connection.” 

The first time she met Jack, his chin was purple and two teeth were violently missing, indicating a major fall. The entire 15-hour trip home, he rocked and “stimmed” to sooth himself, hiding away from the crowd of the airplane. 

Still, when Jack became an American, it felt like a predestined completion — like this little man who loves music and Mardi Gras beads and Miracle League baseball was always meant to share Handl’s heart and home. Every new experience was its own triumphant symphony, a grand slam in Jack’s hungry eyes. Trick-or-treating, the glitz of Christmas — it was just so exciting and fun. 

But then the honeymoon ended, and some health scares reared their ugly heads. Jack went septic in the spring of 2011, with a blood sugar level of almost 600, and doctors had no idea what was happening. More tumors were growing around his lymph nodes, and for years, what might start with a stuffy nose often ended with a lengthy hospital stay. 

Today, after the removal of seven small tumors, Jack has been tumor-free for four years. That’s good for multiple reasons, one of them being that any masses could get in the way of his air guitar-playing, which the 20-year-old takes very seriously.

“We live a couple blocks from the beach, and they have all this music on Sunday afternoons, which he loves,” shares his adoptive mother. “If we go somewhere where there’s music, he won’t eat — he’s got to be front and center, dancing.” 

Dancing is how Jack waltzes through most of life, actually. He even moves and grooves while on deck at his baseball games. Anyone who knows him swears that he is almost always happy. And despite being mostly nonverbal and autistic, he has no problem making friends, nor of conquering his fears and getting his point across through sign and body language and an assisted communication device.

“He graduated high school; he’s afraid of heights but rode an elephant at the circus; he can sight-read now,” Handl lists off. “Anytime we go to a music festival, he will have a harem of women dancing with him.” 

Handl plans on Jack living with her forever, though the two of them will move in with her elderly mother at a certain point. It’s a thought she delights in, instead of dreading. They can keep watching boats on the water together, the three of them, waving to passersby, munching on fresh bread and cold cuts from the nearby Amish grocery store and keeping their ears open for a hint of music to dance to. 

“Jack is just happy and makes everyone else happy,” she says. “The best part is the pride of everything that he has become. He never has a sour day.” 

Which means that the magic of a child’s giggle will keep ringing on — and Handl gets to be the one to hear it.