"It was amazing when I first saw it," said Caroline Randolph, referring to her first sight of snow after her plane touched down in Calgary from her home in Florida in early January. "It was pretty cold when I touched it. It froze my hands."
"I touched it too, it was freezing!" chimed in her twin sister, Josephine. "It was awesome. I love the snow and playing in it."
Growing up in Uganda, snow held an air of intrigue for the Randolph twins, and years after they were adopted and moved to Florida, they still hadn't experienced it firsthand.
Their parents, Jeremy Randolph and Stephanie Murray, delighted in bringing the 14-year-old twins to Vernon to take part in the snowy activities of snowshoeing, ice skating, and tubing up at SilverStar Mountain Resort. The twins' family visited some old family friends, Vernon residents Kirbey and Heidi Lockhart, to make the girls' longtime wish for a first snowy experience come true.
Despite the fact that this year's unseasonably warm Okanagan winter has produced hardly a trace of snow in the valley, the Randolph girls were thrilled by their snowy vacation up on the Vernon mountain.
Beyond their journey to Vernon, the twins' path to a life in Florida amounts to a remarkable story of overcoming hurdles in the name of family.
Jeremy and Stephanie got married in 1992, having met in a youth group in Texas. There, they became friends with the Lockharts who were youth pastors in Dallas as a young couple, and that friendship has lasted to this day.
Years later, already with two biological sons who are now grown, Jeremy and Stephanie decided they wanted more kids, but learned they couldn't have kids of their own again, and so they explored the possibility of adoption.
Jeremy's sister and father had started an orphanage called Amani Baby Cottage in Jinji, Uganda, in 2003. Around this time, his sister, aunt and other people he knew had started adopting babies from this orphanage.
When the couple's oldest son visited the Ugandan orphanage when he was about 16 years old, he was working with the twins when they were around two years old, and made an appeal to his parents to have them join the family.
"He got to know these two really well and started pushing for mom and dad to adopt," Jeremy said. "He really fell in love with the twins."
Stephanie explained that children typically stay at the orphanage only for a few years until they're able to eat on their own and go back to their families, in circumstances in which their family is unable to care for them when they are babies.
But Caroline and Josephine didn't have a family to go back to. Their mother had passed away after childbirth, and a man once believed to be their father turned out not to be after a DNA test. And so they became available for adoption.
"We talked about it, prayed about it," Jeremy said — and in the end, when it was clear the girls couldn't go back to their families Jeremy and Stephanie decided to welcome the twins to their family.
They started the adoption process in 2014. It wasn't until mid-2016 that they were able to get a court date, and beyond that date the challenges were manifold.
"It was just one thing after another with the embassy in Uganda," Stephanie said. "They're very protective because they want to make sure that girls aren't being trafficked or somebody's lying, that maybe they really have family and we're paying them."
Throwing a wrench in the process, the man who turned out not to be the twins' father was the person who had signed off on the adoption. Because he was not the father, his signing off was deemed illegitimate.
They contacted the office of then Florida senator Marco Rubio for help, but ultimately the U.S. State Department didn't have enough trust in their situation to allow the process to move forward.
"The embassy couldn't help us," Stephanie said. "They were saying 'you can't adopt.'"
"We had legal custody. As far as Uganda was concerned we were their legal guardians. It was the United States Immigration and State Department that was having trouble with getting them into the United States," Jeremy said.
As far as Stephanie and Jeremy were concerned, Caroline and Josephine were their daughters and always would be, and so they considered uprooting their lives in Fort Myers, Fla.
"We were having to grapple with the reality of selling everything and moving to Uganda in order to be their parents," Jeremy said. "We have a large family back home in Fort Myers. It was tough."
Stephanie and Jeremy were willing to give up everything for the twins, but thanks to a stroke of luck, they didn't need to.
They explained that a family member of the man who turned out not to be the twins' father had gotten to know the twins well over the years, thinking they were part of his family. The young man's name was Brian, and they'll never forget him for a number of reasons.
For one, he was a Ugandan man who taught salsa classes to foreign nationals in a Mexican restaurant, and as Jeremy intimated, who could forget a man who embodied such an eclectic array of backgrounds?
More importantly, Brian was their key to a successful adoption.
Because Brian knew the girls well, and because he had some clout with the people at the embassy, Brian was able to vouch for the parents' adoption story and serve as the point of trust needed for the involved governments to support the adoption.
"He told the entire story, the twins' whole story, and it lined up with everything we had told them," Jeremy said.
What sealed the deal was that Brian had taught salsa lessons to the case manager overseeing Jeremy and Stephanie's adoption of Caroline and Josephine.
"If he had not done those stupid salsa lessons, they'd still be in Uganda," Jeremy said with a laugh.
After that saga, the twins were able to live with their adoptive parents in Fort Myers.
In may ways, their adoption story is one of refusal to give in to circumstances.
At one point in the adoption process, word got out that American companies were paying Ugandan families to let their children be adopted by U.S. families. Jeremy said that led to both the American and Ugandan governments halting adoptions immediately, and adoption laws were changed in the middle of their adoption process.
That left Stephanie and Jeremy with a heart-wrenching dilemma: according to the new laws, families must live in Uganda for at least a year in order to adopt Ugandan children.
This would discourage most international parents from adopting, but not Stephanie and Jeremy.
Stephanie ended up living in Uganda for a full year, apart from her husband and two sons, both of whom were about to get married at weddings she would have to miss.
Despite how hard it was to be away, Stephanie knew it was what she had to do.
"We knew we wanted to adopt them," she said. "And so we had faith in God that somehow it was going to work out."
In addition to the twins and their two sons, Jeremy and Stephanie have taken in four other kids, and life is good in Fort Myers with eight children and two parents who refused to succumb to an arduous bureaucratic system.
Their inspiring story even caught the attention of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the local ESPN station, who did a story about the twins and invited them to a home game in a suite in 2022. The NFL team let the twins put the headsets on to give some pre-game analysis and commentary, fulfilling one of their wishes that Jeremy had shared in an online post that went viral.
The commentating experience was a treat for the girls, who are highly competitive basketball players and who, while in Vernon, had been talking about hockey non-stop after going to a hockey game.
The ESPN story was a chance to reflect on an adoption journey in which Jeremy and Stephanie jumped over every imaginable hurdle to bring home their daughters, who at seven years old had by then aged out of the orphanage.
"There was no chance at all that we were going to just let them go back," Jeremy said. "We were mom and dad."
Jeremy expressed gratitude for their family, and friends like the Lockharts, who supported them every step fo the way.
"The story for these girls isn't really just us adopting them, it is that the people around us, the friends and family, they're 100 per cent all in, and they treat these girls like family, and that means everything to us."
