After years of trying to have children, Jason and Schoena Strudwick were facing an embarrassment of riches – their dreams were coming true, times two, only a few months apart.

At the end of 2010, the couple took another shot at in-vitro fertilization, using an egg donor, and this time, it worked.

However, the couple had already started the process of adopting – but when Schoena was five months pregnant, they decided to freeze their file, which would essentially stop the process.

It appears waiting until their first baby was born was not in the cards for the growing family, in April 2011, they received a call from the international adoption agency they had registered with.

Social workers told the couple a birth mother in South Carolina had chosen them to adopt her baby.

“We asked each other, should we do this?” Jason said.

“We knew it would be crazy, because they would be 4.5 months apart,” Schoena said. “We just kept saying, what are the chances, there is a reason this happened.”

Their adopted son, Kane, was born in Spartanberg, North Carolina – and the couple travelled there to pick him up.

When the couple met their new son in the hospital for the first time, he was two weeks old, and a nurse was holding him.

“She held him up and said ‘Kane, here is your mommy and daddy,’ it was wild,” Schoena said. “[It] seems like yesterday.”

“The moment you get that child, or the moment that child comes into your life, the pain goes away.”

Welcoming Marley, baby number two

Four months later, their miracle grew again – with the birth of Marley in August 2011, at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.

Despite Kane and Marley’s unique paths to the Strudwick family, their parents said to them, however they joined the family – they belong together.

“There is nothing about either one of them that don’t feel like ours,” Schoena said. “There is no difference in me having carried Marley, and Kane coming through adoption.

“There is nothing that feels different, I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘When you guys got Kane did it feel any different than when they handed Marley to you?’ And it didn’t.”

The two new additions to their family quickly became their new normal.

“You know, five months ago we couldn’t even say ‘kid’,” Schoena said, in an interview with CTV’s Carrie Doll in 2011. “We had a baby on the inside. Now, all of a sudden its kids, plural, that’s weird.”

“People ask us if we get enough sleep, and are we tired and stressed, but we went through a lot of that before,” Jason said. “We weren’t sleeping before because we were stressed out, so this is the easy part.”

Sharing information for other families facing infertility

Now, the family hopes their experience can help other couples facing infertility issues learn what the resources available to them are.

“It’s amazing how many people are going through it silently and helplessly,” Schoena said. “That’s why Jason and I wanted to talk about it.”

“We had blind faith in the medical world, that they were going to get us through it, and we were going to get pregnant,” Jason said. “Quite frankly, most people have that result.

“They go do their one treatment, and they get pregnant, I wish that would have been us but it wasn’t.

“What we would have done differently is we would have got to know the terminology and what was going on in Schoena’s body and my body, ask questions, research it, and talk to friends who are doctors so they can explain it.”

With files from Carrie Doll

Their story is not yet complete, tune in to CTV News at Six, and to CTV Edmonton’s website on Wednesday, April 10 to hear the next major, unexpected, milestone the family encountered – in what even their doctors cannot explain…