This Couple Ended up with Three Sets of Twins All Born on the Same Day
Here is a list of the most compelling comments we have received in the last five days. Want to get on it? Leave a constructive and positive comment below to increase your chances. This couple ended up with three sets of twins, all born on the same day. What would you do if you got three sets of twins, all born on the same day? This couple from Union Grove, Wisconsin, was over the moon, especially after being told they couldn’t have children. They received a once-in-a-generation family, and here is their story. [Music]
When Craig Kozinski asked Carrie for her hand, she immediately began planning for a large family. “I grew up in a big family, and growing up, I had always wanted 18 children. That was my number. Well, I was adopted, so I was determined to do it. I know how sad you get and lonely, and you just want a family that’s going to love you.”
The couple lived on a ranch in Union Grove, Wisconsin. The two were ready to start a big family, both financially and mentally. Moreover, they had already created a plan: they wanted to have both biological and adopted kids. Carrie herself was adopted. “I wanted to open my home up to children in need. He said that he would be open to it, and that is why I chose to marry him. But we wanted to try to have our own children first and then adopt,” the woman told ABC News.
The couple tried to get pregnant before adopting a kid. However, their plans weren’t about to become real, as Carrie was experiencing health complications. They were trying to have a baby for years, but to no avail. Then, Carrie started experiencing some abdominal pain. She immediately rushed to the hospital in fear that she might be infertile. “Quickly after we got married, actually, I had been seeing the doctor, and they said it was going to be very difficult for us to get pregnant on our own.”
You see, the statistics say that in the USA at least 12 percent of women cannot carry a pregnancy to term, which is called impaired fecundity. However, the doctors broke to Carrie even worse news: she had a chronic disease called endometriosis. “The doctors told us we wouldn’t be able to have kids on our own,” she said. People with endometriosis are not necessarily infertile, yet they have a much higher chance of infertility. For Carrie, her diagnosis crashed all her dreams and her heart.
Craig and Carrie had to make up another plan, and when they were reconsidering their future, they got a rare opportunity. A friend of theirs reached out to the couple and revealed she was pregnant. “At that time, we only knew that it was one; we didn’t know that it was twins. She basically said that she couldn’t take care of them, and so she needed somebody that would be willing to give them the love that they deserved. And of course, I was like, well, yes, let’s just do this.”
You see, she had already had a previous set of twins born on February 28, 2013. Now the woman was short on money and couldn’t raise more kids. Her due date was in February of 2014. Carrie and Craig agreed to such a fantastic proposal without hesitation. “We just felt like that was what God wanted us to do,” Carrie told Today. “So we decided to put our plans down and pursue the plan that God had for us, and that was to adopt first.”
The twins were born on February 28, 2014, and the Kozinskis became the parents of two beautiful girls named Adalyn and Kenna. Now the couple finally had a bigger family. Meanwhile, they continued trying to get their own kids and become biological parents. After all, Carrie’s chances of conceiving were low, but not impossible. “We still wanted to have our own children. We decided to go through IVF.” The woman went on IVF treatments with the hope they would work out.
IVF, or In Vitro Fertilization, retrieves the eggs and fertilizes them in a sperm lab. Then, the mother has the embryo implanted in her uterus. Not all embryos stick, and IVF can take a long period to succeed, but the Kozinskis didn’t want to give up on their dream. The process of adopting their twins was very long. In 2015, the Kozinskis were still in the middle of it when suddenly their biological mother reached the couple. You may not believe it, but she asked them to adopt her other twins that were born before Adalyn and Kenna.
“A year later, she contacted us again and asked us to take care of JJ and CeCe. We said yes,” Carrie said in an interview. Seemingly, the biological mother could no longer care for the children. The older set of twins, JJ and CeCe, also joined the Kozinski family. Interestingly, they were born on the same day as Adalyn and Kenna, but a year earlier! This is incredibly rare. In the USA, 32 in every 1,000 births are twins, which is only around 3 percent. The odds of siblings having the same birthday is 1 in 365, which is only 0.27 percent. The Kozinskis not only had a family now, but they had an incredibly unique and rare family.
In September of 2015, Craig and Carrie were still adjusting to their new family when they received the news that turned their life upside down. You see, IVF had succeeded, and Carrie was expecting her own kids! In a month, the family received an even more shocking surprise: Carrie was having twins. “We were in shock but super happy,” she said. They now had six children—three sets of twins—to take care of.
Unfortunately, Carrie’s water broke earlier than was expected. The woman went to the hospital and had to remain on bed rest for six weeks. After six weeks of being in the hospital, Carrie had to undergo an emergency C-section, which was performed successfully. Her new twins, Clarissa and Caroline, had to stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) until they were strong enough to leave. Even though both babies were underweight and had some scar tissue on their lungs, they were alive.
Initially, their due date was in June, but due to the complications, they were welcomed to this world through a C-section on—you guessed it—February 28, 2016. Now the Kozinskis were the parents of three sets of twins born on the same day. A miracle, you would say. To put it in perspective, the Guinness World Record for biological siblings born on the same day is five. The odds of that are 17.7 billion to one.
The newborn babies underwent several surgeries and had viral infections. They developed scar tissue on their lungs and had to remain on oxygen while they were in the NICU. Carrie visited them every day, driving from her farm in Union Grove to the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa. When The Journal Times asked the couple how they handled it, they both answered, “Prayer.” It was a challenging period for the family, but Clarissa and Caroline gained enough weight and developed their organs. In a few months, they were finally strong enough to leave the hospital and meet their siblings for the first time.
“They almost didn’t make it,” Carrie later told ABC News. “They’re definitely our little miracle babies.” Craig described the experience as, “I had imagined getting married and having three or four kids. Things have definitely changed. We have twice as many children as I thought we would have.”
Turning back to the adoption process, it wasn’t over yet. In fact, there was an issue the family had to solve. “We’d started the process of adopting the now three-year-old twins when the birth mom contacted us about taking the now four-year-old twins,” Carrie explained. They decided to pause the adoption process until the four-year-old twins arrived. It’s cheaper to do it all together than separate adoptions, but then the couple gave birth to their biological twins.
You see, it’s quite expensive to adopt a child nowadays. Most couples pay well over $30,000 for legal assistance from attorneys and government administrators, along with social help from adoption specialists, counselors, social workers, and physicians. At that point, the Kozinskis had already spent over $25,000 on IVF treatment and different medications. Carrie and Craig had already invested tens of thousands of dollars before they could finish the adoption process.
What’s even worse is that Carrie didn’t work; the family relied only on Craig’s accountant income. So, they decided to launch a GoFundMe campaign and call it the “Quad Squad Adoption Fund,” aiming to raise $13,000. “We are saving a lot of money by adopting both sets together,” Carrie wrote on the page. “So now that we have legal guardianship of all four, we have decided to proceed with adopting all of them together. We can’t imagine our lives without our little quad squad.”
Luckily, the family managed to raise enough money, thanks to the news channels they had already been on. Sites like ABC News, Today, and The Journal Times all reported on Carrie’s story. Within a year, her GoFundMe page got almost 800 shares and 160 followers. The news reports on Carrie’s family attracted Karen Kingsbury, best-selling author and founder of the One Chance Foundation. Kingsbury and her employees were deeply touched by the family’s story, especially by the fact that all four adopted children are biological siblings.
“These siblings could grow up together. That’s what captured our hearts,” she told ABC News. “We were in tears in our office.” With the help of kind-hearted people, the family garnered $14,400 from the GoFundMe page alone. Some strangers donated only $5, others over $500. “It’s such a huge blessing to us,” Carrie told Today.
On January 24, 2019, Craig and Carrie updated their site for the last time, informing their followers they paid off their adoption fees. “On January 18th, we were able to finalize the adoption of our four children,” Carrie wrote. “Thank you all so much for your donations,” she continued, and closed the GoFundMe page afterward.
You might have thought that the three pairs of twins—two of them being biologically related—have similar personalities. But in fact, Carrie denied it. “They are all very different,” she told Today. “Each has their very own personality, which is very fun, but we get pulled in six different directions.”
In November of 2017, The Journal Times said the Kozinskis were getting their own show. The family was reached out to by PeopleTV to be featured on the show Family Portrait, which explores diverse families all over the United States. Since their story went viral online, the family was invited to different shows, yet they turned everything down. According to Carrie, they decided to take a chance on one documentary episode to see how it goes. “We just thought that it would be beneficial to our family in the long run financially,” she said.
But why do the Kozinskis refuse to be featured in all these shows? Well, they just do not want their family to be portrayed poorly or inaccurately. “We told the producers if we felt our family and our faith wasn’t portrayed the way we wanted, we would cancel,” she explained. “We don’t want the producers to jump all over us. We’re still up in the air about it,” the mother of six added.
Turning back to the youngest twins, they seem to be developing more slowly than the other siblings, as was expected, but Carrie said they are doing well. “They’re scooting around the house, not quite walking yet,” she reported in 2017 when the girls were near a year old. “Eating everything in sight and babbling, not talking words quite yet.”
While Adalyn and Kenna were doing fine, their four siblings were also growing up quickly. CeCe, JJ, Adalyn, and Kenna all visited Montessori preschool at the same time. “They’re learning all their numbers and letters, and they’ve learned the five Great Lakes,” Carrie said. “We love all our children the same,” she added. “We wouldn’t want our lives to be any different. Having six kids at home means you will never have a dull moment.”
“It’s just kind of happened all at once. You can’t fuss with the stuff too much,” Craig said. “We think it is definitely meant to be that we would have all of them,” said Carrie. “It’s just God’s way of saying, ‘Here, I’m giving you these children as a blessing, and I’m going to be making it interesting and fun for you by having them all born on the same day.'”
