That unimaginable feeling you get when you surprisingly meet a brother or sister who you had no idea even existed. Talk less of a spiting image of yourself!
These two 10-year olds, Audrey Doering, from Wisconsin and Gracie Rainsberry from Washington state, were in tears as they embraced for the first time after being adopted by two American families months after birth.
The families adopted the two girls from China.
Audrey had told her parents that she wanted a a sister for Christmas this year.
She never expected what would happen next . “It felt like there was somebody missing. Now, it’s complete,” she said.
“I thought my parents were, like, playing a joke on me,” Audrey said, adding that when she video chatted with her sister for the first time, her initial reaction was that “she’s me.”
Gracie added that her and her sister have a lot in common. “We both love chicken Alfredo. That’s like one of our favorite foods. And we both love mac ‘n’ cheese.”
On meeting each other for the first time, Gracie said: “It’s very overwhelming…. I was, like… started to cry a lot, and my mom kept on asking me … what my crying was for, and I was saying, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know what to think.”
The two girls also suffered heart conditions. Gracie underwent two heart surgeries after arriving in the U.S. and Audrey underwent one.
Audrey’s mother, Jennifer Doering said she started researching her child’s past while trying to get Christmas present for her.
She said that with the help of a Chinese researcher, she discovered a photo that depicted her daughter on the knee of her Chinese foster mom, who is also carrying another baby that looked just like Audrey.
Doering said she became desperate to find out who the other child was. she later discovered that that was her child’s twin and she had also been adopted by a U.S. family.
“Oh, it was unbelievable. I’m like, ‘How?’ I mean, this is stuff you read about. And how, how could it really be that there are two of them?” Doering said.
She said that she found Gracie’s mother, Nicole Rainsberry, through Facebook.
Rainsberry said: “I mean, it’s hard to process that information. It was so crazy to be looking at what looked like Gracie, but knowing that it wasn’t Gracie.”
Awesome… oh what a feeling