"Virtual twins"

Interracial twins bring a new dimension to the American family
Jenna and Sam Goering are in the same grade in school, play with the same younger brother and sisters, and live in the same spacious farmhouse-style home in Bourbonnais, Ill.

Seven years ago, they entered their parents' lives on the same day.

And yet, Jenna and Sam aren't twins.

He was born in the U.S., the biological son of computer consultants Jody and Addison Goering. She was abandoned six months earlier in rural China, and first introduced to the Goerings through a string of urgent phone calls that started coming from their adoption agency just an hour after Sam's birth.

Together, Jenna, who is Asian, and Sam, who is white, are part of a phenomenon that would have been almost inconceivable a generation ago: the emergence of interracial adoptive "twins."

Born less than 9 months apart, such "virtual twins," as same-age siblings are sometimes called, are often the result of an unexpected pregnancy to a woman with fertility problems and an adoption that was already in the works when the woman got pregnant.