They were a poor couple who farmed rice paddies in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. They had four children already. They couldn’t afford to raise another child. Let alone twins.

On the other side of the world, in Bellaire, Texas, lived another couple. They had thriving careers and competed in triathlons for fun. The man had one grown son from a previous marriage. He wanted more children, and his wife wanted her first child. But they had let time get away from them. They were too old.

Each couple made a life-changing decision. For the Vietnamese couple, it was a tragic one. They left their twin girls at an orphanage, hoping the babies would have a more secure future.

The Bellaire couple, Jerry and Betsy Bates, chose to hope, too. They hoped that despite his being 58 and her being 47, they could find a child to call their own.

As you might have guessed, they found two.

Betsy Bates remembers when she first started thinking seriously about having children. She had grown up in Memphis, Tennessee, and had been in Houston for 25 years. Now in her late 40s, she had just left a large company where she was a vice president in charge of researching international ventures.

“I had never had children. I was talking to some friends and they had suggested adoption was something I should look into,” Betsy remembers. “I had never thought about it before. My job was pretty much my life at that point.”

Jerry, who grew up in “a little swamp outside of New Orleans” and now worked as an insurance broker, long had wished for a little brother or sister for his now-grown son, Brent. But, despite his youthful and athletic appearance, Jerry was 58, 11 years older than Betsy, who also had remained energetic and fit with an intense exercise routine.

“I always wanted more children. My first wife, after we had Brent, couldn’t have any more children. I thought it was not possible to adopt at my age,” he said.

After asking around, Jerry and Betsy were referred to the Gladney Center for Adoption in Dallas. They wanted an infant and at first considered adopting from Russia or Romania, so the child’s ethnicity would be similar to theirs, but ran into restrictions because of their age. In most countries, the upper age limit for adopting parents is 45 years.

Jerry and Betsy knew it would be tough to find an infant in the United States, and private adoptions were risky. There was always the chance the birth mother would back out of the adoption, and they feared a greater risk that the child could be born under the influence of drugs or alcohol. So, when they learned Gladney had an adoption program in Vietnam, where poor economic prospects often can lead to children being orphaned or given up, they knew that was where their future lay.

“All the Vietnamese people I’ve met I’ve been impressed with and admired their culture,” says Jerry.

So the decision was made. But as the Bates’ were to discover, the journey was just beginning.

For a year, they waited for their name to reach the top of the list of prospective parents. Then they received a phone call. There were newborn twin girls available, and the single woman who was ahead of them on the parent waiting list didn’t think she could handle twins. So, could they?

Could they? Jerry and Betsy answered with a quick, “Yes!” They’d already decided that they wanted to adopt two children, but they weren’t sure they had it in them to wait through two long adoptive processes. So twins fit the bill perfectly.

Betsy remembers when they first saw photos of the girls. She and Jerry met for a special lunch and slipped out the pictures together. The girls looked smushed and adorable as all newborns do, but with a surprising sprinkle of reddish hair.  “That was the first time we knew that they were the ones for us,” Betsy says.

By the time the Bates received the photos, the newborns had grown into 2-month-olds. Jerry and Betsy anticipated that, with all the bureaucratic hoops they knew they’d have to jump through, they’d get to bring the girls home to Bellaire at 8 months of age.

When they were 6 months old, the babies received a visit from their prospective parents. “I felt like it was important to bond with them while they were young,” says Betsy. “When we first saw them, we were really very pleasantly surprised. They were so cute, alert and wise.”

The babies were kept in an upstairs suite of rooms at an orphanage with about 20 other babies in Can Tho, a city about the size of Austin south of Saigon. The rooms were clean, and the babies were healthy, says Betsy, but they had few toys to play with and rarely were taken outside.

Jerry and Betsy took videos of all the babies for the other prospective parents back in the United States and returned to Bellaire with hope that they would soon be new parents. Then they waited for all the papers that had to be signed by a plethora of authorities, from the local Vietnam province leaders up through immigration officials in both countries.

At eight months of age, the babies still weren’t theirs. At 12 months, the Bates went back to Vietnam again for another week’s visit. But they still weren’t allowed to bring the girls home.

As it turned out, Vietnam and the United States were haggling over an adoption treaty and couldn’t come to an agreement. The Bates adoption was caught up in the meantime. Jerry and Betsy feared they might never get their girls. They hired a Houston law firm with connections in Vietnam and held their breath.

“We were not any younger at that time. The thought of starting over was overwhelming,” Betsy says. “It was pretty torturous there at the end.”

Finally, when the girls were 18 months old, the Bates traveled to Vietnam one last time. When they left, they brought home their twin toddlers, Brittany Hope Hanh Bates and Brianna Faith Youm Bates.

Despite their elation, Betty admits, the 36-hour plane trip back to Bellaire “was just a nightmare,” lugging two girls in backpacks with all the luggage and documentation to be filled out at every stop. But Brittany and Brianna, despite the stress and knowing no English, took it all in stride. Like any toddlers, they climbed over plane seats and destroyed hotel rooms with cheerful abandon.

Once at their new home in the 4400 block of Valerie, the girls promptly climbed out of their cribs that their parents had bought back when they expected little babies instead of active children.

Their big brother, now 35, babysat and helped with everything except diaper changes. Their parents found that they exercised less and laughed more. They considered themselves “lucky to afford babysitting,” as they discovered two active young children required more parental vigor than they had imagined.

“I think I didn’t understand exactly how physical motherhood can be,” says Becky. “They take a lot of energy.”

The girls are now 4. Brittany loves to dance, and Brianna loves to sing. They go to preschool at St. Luke’s Methodist Church and have almost caught up to their peers when it comes to speaking English, thanks in part to Barney and Elmo. They have started to ask questions as to why they have brown eyes and their parents have blue eyes, but, for the most part, “they don’t really think of themselves as Vietnamese,” says Betsy.

One day, say Betsy and Jerry, they will explain more about what the girls’ future might have been like if their birth parents, with little money and too many mouths to feed, hadn’t been courageous enough to give them up. “Their life would have been barefoot in the rice fields,” says Betsy. “It would have been pretty rough.”

But for now, Jerry and Betsy are basking in the sweet madness of preschoolers who call them “Mommy and Daddy”. Jerry, experienced in parenthood as a young adult, knows the second time around is to be treasured. Now 62 and “more secure with myself,” he says he is a more relaxed father than before and that the experience is keeping him young and says, “It’s a lot more rewarding than I ever imagined.”