"Twins Are the Coolest Thing Ever!" - Referral Day Part 1

Well, we wanted to put up a really sentimental, love-fest of a post on November 7th, to mark the one year anniversary of our Referral Day, the day when we received our referral package from China and saw our daughters' faces for the first time.

Alas, Daddy Relcuk has been travelling out of town a lot and, at the same time, our babysitter has more or less quit coming to work. This means that Mommy Relcuk has been pulling a few solo stints during the last few weeks and we've been spending the weekends playing catch up.

So, better late than never, here's the story of how we found out that we were going to be parents to twins . . .

Our twins came via FedEx. Some adoption agencies will phone the waiting parents and tell them the details of their adoption match on the phone. Our agency did not do this -- they just send out the paperwork information to the parents. We had requested twins, but had been told that the chances of being matched with twins was about 1 in 500. That meant that when we opened the package, we had no idea that it contained twins!

The delivery person declined to be photographed so, here is a photo of Mommy with the package:

Here is a photo of Harper with the package. Boy, did he have no idea what this all meant for him!

At the time, Mommy was living in the U.S. and Daddy had already moved to Canadialand. So, Mommy phoned Daddy and started opening the package while narrating on the phone. She pulled out the two sets of paperwork and set one aside -- she assumed that there were two sets of paperwork because there were duplicate originals, one set to sign and keep, one set to sign and return. We lawyers do this all the time and the whole world thinks like lawyers, right?

Still on the phone with Daddy, she read off the name, birthdate and province of their new daughter. Daddy asked, what does she look like? Giddy with excitement, Mommy started to describe each of the photos. (For the record, Mommy was looking at R's paperwork.)

Then she got to this photo and said "Wait a minute. Why is this other girl in the picture? Why does she look just like her?"

Daddy was freaking out. He kept saying, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" into the phone. Mommy kept snapping, "Just a minute. Just a minute." as she tried to compare the two sets of paperwork, which, incidentally, were almost entirely in Chinese.

Then, realization dawned on her and, in a moment for the baby book, Mommy said "Holy $%&*! It's twins!" And then she started laughing and crying at the same time. Daddy kept saying "Twins are the coolest thing ever!" After reading this post and this other post, you may realize now that Mommy has been saying "Holy $%&*!" a lot in the last year. Really, can you blame her?

Now, a year later, we both consider ourselves so lucky to have been matched with twins. It has been insane and wonderful at the same time. They enjoy each other so much and we love watching them together. While we are perpetually exhausted, we can't imagine being parents to "just" one kiddo.