Amy & Lily

Twins is What They Do!

It’s always fun to get to hear a family’s adoption story once they have their little one. That’s why we’re so excited to launch Testimonial Tuesdays! Every Tuesday, we’ll share an adoption testimonial from an American Adoptions family. Their journeys are different, but in the end, they all have successfully grown their family through adoption.

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Our first testimonial family was blessed with not one, but two bundles of joy. Dan and Dawn had one biological son Matthew but longed to grow their family, especially for Matthew to learn what being a sibling was like. The couple joined American Adoptions and was elated to receive an adoption opportunity with a woman who was pregnant with twins. Dan and Dawn traveled to the birth mother’s state and took physical custody of the twins until the adoption disrupted a week later.
Although Dawn said it felt like the end of the world, the couple knew that they wanted to keep pursuing adoption. “We had a little philosophy with our son. If he falls off his bike, you tell him to get back on, and it was a little of the same. We were all right. It was not ideal, but waiting didn’t make it any better. So we signed back up,” Dan said.

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Just three months later, Dawn and Dan received a call that twins girls had been born in New York. Taken completely off-guard, the couple excitedly accepted the adoption opportunity and traveled, after a few more roller coaster days, when they learned that the girls were officially theirs. The bigger of the twins Lily was discharged from the hospital immediately; her smaller sister Amy remained in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Lily’s first night with Dan and Dawn was spent in a dresser drawer lined with blankets. What’s a couple to do in a hotel without a crib in an unknown city? Two weeks later, and after a change of hotels, Amy was discharged from the hospital. Dawn said, “she had this look on her face like, oh there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Bonding between parents and twins took no time at all. Big bother Matthew quickly stepped up as well. Dawn called him the “little parent,” while Dan said, “he’s so helpful.” As Dawn pointed out, “he waited just as long as we did to have his sisters.” Just over a year old now, Amy and Lily are beginning to show their personalities. “It will be interesting to see if it plays out this way,” Dan said. “Lily seems to be more of a dreamer, artist, drama queen. And Amy seems to have a little more spunk to her… but they’ll flip-flop too. There’ll be times where Lily gets a glint in her eye like, let’s just see what happens. And Amy just tends to watch and say, let’s just see what happens when Lily does this.” It might have only been a year since Dan, Dawn and Matthew welcomed Amy and Lily into their family, but they can hardly remember life without them. As Dawn says, “The fact that they’re adopted comes second to me to the fact that they’re twins, that there’s two of them!”