In our case, there’s the baby sister of our daughter’s ’sissy’, but we and our daughter have **always** made a big point to include her in with the gang. The worst problem is that a three-year-old is less able to keep up with two six-year-olds who are very bright, but she tries hard.

As to visits - the girls pretty much demand it. This year, they came up to Chicago and saw their first snow in February, and my wife and daughter went down for a week in August. Does this eat up vacation time? Sure. But the girls are the ones who miss each other like crazy, and it’s their wishes that push this.

If I could, I’d like to address a few of the questions on this.

(1) Testing on this stuff in regards to DNA is not where it needs to be for absolute proof in all cases. No question about it. Identicals match up in all cases as mirrors of each other, and known fraternals can vary more than you think.

My feeling is that people shouldn’t go *looking* for this, as such, but if it drops in your lap, DNA testing is just one more way to check things out. With no mom or dad to compare the kids against, there’s no 100% on fraternals, but a very high (80%+) DNA score is hard to deny, if you add in the times of birth, location, and a lot of other factors (looks, intelligence levels, allergies and whatnot). We assume that ours are fraternals as the simplest explanation that fits the facts, and the older they get, the more likely that is looking to be the case.

Homogeneity - well, yes and no. If you’re talking one village where (until recently) people hadn’t moved out of town for hundreds of years, sure. In a city of 3 million, I don’t think so.

(2) Are there people who get the idea that there’s a sibling of their kid out there and will beat down the door to find that sibling? Sure. I always say - sure, it’s most likely there’s a sibling, and maybe more than one, and a bio mom and dad. But you will almost certainly never find them, whether they are here or in China. Needle in the haystack. Not worth deliberately digging.

In our case, it was a total coincidence all the way through. That includes the names being the same, and that both families were on the internet, let alone the orphanage mailing list, or that one or both would put up websites with kid pictures - and so on. Think of all of the people that you know that are NOT online…or savvy enough to deal with anything other than work email and would never put anything on the web.

(3) Bonds. In our case, both families had kids who were - well, ‘alone’, and wanted an ‘other’ since they could talk. This was so strong that the parents went towards the idea of a little sister, and the thing that triggered the other family to post their web site was - they came home with the little sister and wanted to show the pictures to friends and family.

In our case, we were about to start the process for Little Sister when all this came up.

When they got together, they bonded like glue right away, and are terribly bonded to each other. I never believed in twin bonds before I saw them together, and it’s just gotten stronger over the years.

Now, you have to make sure the girls have time together. But then, where does that leave the other siblings in the family? i.e. (again!) Okay, it’s time to go spend our yearly week with the Smith family so the two sisters can have time with each other.

I don’t know how this would work since I’ve never had to consider it.

Although….I’ve seen some girls that look so, so much like our gal.