Couple Who Welcomed Twins via Embryo Adoption Celebrates Their First Christmas at Home (Exclusive)

“We've got these two amazing kids and literally every day is like going to Disney World," mom Mary Leah Miller tells PEOPLE

After years of trying, Mary Leah and Rodney Miller were thrilled to welcome twins last December. Their children, born two days before Christmas via embryo adoption, are now celebrating their first birthday — and their first Christmas at home.

"I wanted these tiny humans for so long,” Mary Leah Miller, 41, tells PEOPLE. “It has honestly been just the biggest joy and the biggest blessing.”

The couple is sharing their story to make sure other couples know about embryo adoption. “We want people to hear about it, to know that it is an option,” the mom of two says. “There's thousands of frozen embryos out there.”

Related: Mich. Parents Forced to Adopt Their Biological Twins Are Closer to Changing Surrogacy Law (Exclusive)

Mary Leah and Rodney Miller met in 2004 when they were both students at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. “She's amazing,” says Rodney, 46, now an attorney specializing in consumer fraud.

Rodney proposed in 2007, while she was cramming for finals, and they tied the knot the following year.

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When it came time to have kids, the couple spent a year trying to conceive before being referred to a fertility expert. But after trying a number of medications and four rounds of intrauterine insemination, "we still weren't pregnant," Mary Leah says.

Because doctors didn’t see anything wrong, the couple was diagnosed with “unexplained infertility.”

After several rounds of in vitro fertilization and every treatment doctors recommended, the couple started looking into other options — and in May 2020, friends asked if they had ever heard of embryo adoption.

“We just knew that this was for us,” Mary Leah says. “I'd always held the hope that I would be pregnant, and embryo adoption would allow us to not only adopt — but allow me to carry the children.”

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The couple ended up adopting embryos from two families and Mary Leah says she feels honored that someone she didn’t know gave her “the gift” of having a family. Although her first pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage, the couple went on to adopt five embryos from a different family, and in April 2022 she became pregnant with twins.

“I got super excited when I would get sick, because that was confirmation for me that everything was okay," she says.

And finally, on Dec. 23, 2022, twins Dalton and Mary Elizabeth were born via c-section.

Last year, the family was still in the hospital for Christmas (Rodney ended up picking up their holiday dinner from Waffle House), so the couple plans to have a big celebration this time around.

"This will be the first Christmas at home,” Mary Leah says. “It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be really special.”

They plan to have about 50 friends and family to celebrate the twins jingle bell-themed party, otherwise known as: “Oh what fun! Dalton and Mary Elizabeth are turning one!!”

“I love that their birthday is right before Christmas,” Mary Leah says. “I love that every year I get a gift when we celebrate their birthday. It’s amazing.”

Related: Couple Carrying Each Other’s Baby Thanks to Reciprocal IVF Give Birth Days Apart: ‘We Got Very Fortunate’

The couple — who both serve on the board of Carrywell, a non-profit that will soon start a partnership to offer financial support to others pursuing embryo adoption — says the experience brought them closer to each other.

“It was a long journey. And I think we could have gotten lost in that and felt just really hopeless. And there were times where it looked kind of bleak, but we kept the faith,” Mary Leah says. “We've got these two amazing kids and literally every day is like going to Disney World.

“It's been difficult, it's been discouraging and disappointing at times, but we wouldn't change a single thing about it now that we have these two,” adds Rodney. “Every morning we walk in there and see those two standing up in their crib and they're just beaming with smiles. It's just amazing. We had plenty of time to think about how awesome it would be — and turns out it's even better than we imagined.”

As for the future, the couple says they're planning on transferring another embryo or two in February.

“I'm thrilled,” Rodney adds. “We have everything our hearts have ever desired, and we still have three more embryos to possibly grow our family some more.”

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