By Jennifer Eisenbart
Editor
Life has been a little out of the ordinary lately for Craig and Carrie Kosinski, who live just outside Union Grove.
Carrie’s pregnancy with twins ended at 25 weeks after six weeks of bed rest. Both of the micropreemies – Karraline and Clarissa – remain at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, both still on respirators though doctors are optimistic Clarissa could be off hers soon.
“There was no controlling the day they were going to be born,” Carrie Kosinski explained, adding that the umbilical cord had prolapsed and an emergency C-section had to be performed.
While the two tiny twin sisters would be a story in and of themselves, Craig and Carrie have more to tell – the story of J.J. and CeCe and Kenna and Adalynn.
The couple is working on financing adoptions for the two sets of twins, ages 3 and 2, after having guardianship for Kenna and Adalynn since they were born, and for J.J. and CeCe for about a year.
The cost for the pair of adoptions, Carrie explained, is about $17,000 to $20,000, because both are private adoptions through separate agencies. Carrie is not even 30 years old.
A friend of Carrie’s sister approached Carrie about helping with J.J. and CeCe while she was pregnant with a second set of twins.
“She’s young, and she didn’t have a boyfriend or a husband or anything,” Carrie explained.
The couple opened their house to the two older twins while the mother was pregnant with the two younger twins, and then took legal guardianship of Kenna and Adalynn and sent J.J. and CeCe back to their mother.
But soon after bringing Kenna and Adalynn home, the mother then asked Craig and Carrie to keep J.J. and CeCe, as she was unable to handle the burden as a single mother.
“We’d told her no in the beginning,” Carrie said, but she added that they finally decided to keep the siblings together.
Then came the news last August, that Carrie was pregnant.
“We were trying even before we had Adalynn and Kenna,” she said. “We were told it was going to be very difficult to conceive.
“I was super excited,” she added. “We didn’t find out right away it was twins.”
The pregnancy appeared to be going well until the 19-week mark, when Carrie started experiencing contractions while doing laundry.
She ended up at Wheaton Franciscan in Racine for six weeks of bed rest – “upside down for quite a while,” she said.
But having several children was always on the couple’s to-do list.
“We thought we would have two or three kids, and maybe adopt one,” Craig said. “Then we did kind of the opposite. Life is not always how you plan it.
“It’s a little crazy, for sure,” he added. “That’s a lot of kids, at that very young age. For me, it’s overwhelming on my own.
“But for my wife, she thrives on that.”
Anyone interested in donating to the adoption costs can do so through Carrie’s PayPal account, to the email [email protected].
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