<p>My kids have all have cell phones and have gotten them over a period of 5 years. And they all have very similar numbers which drives me nuts if I don’t just press the call icon on my cell phone. How the heck that happened makes no sense to me as they are not even the same carriers.</p>
<p>I was with a group of art restorers at the very very small church of San Damiano just outside of Assisi’s walls. We sat in the back while several dozen Franciscans began a mass. One of the brothers came out to the congregation and asked me (in Italian) if I cared to come to the front and read some biblical passages. I declined and as I declined, the brother asked in perfect American English…“where did you go to High School?” Ends up that we sat next to each other in study hall. And when we met after the service,.he knew my room mate in Italy, who had nothing to do with my HS in Detroit, but he knew her family in NYC. Global connectivity is extraordinary.
One of my favorite games is “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” . Linking Kevin Bacon to anyone by six people. It can be done.</p>
<p>That triplet story was an interesting one to me. From what I gather, the multiples were all being separated anyways. There was always a shortage of babies to be adopted, particularly certain types, so to give one family multiples would not likely to have happened. Also, when I was growing up, the advice to those who had twins was to separate them at school and on teams and other things. So I do believe that the separation would have been done. </p>
<p>Now days, with so much info being given and adoptions being more open the families and the children would likely know they were multiples if they were adopted separately which might or might not happen. It is pretty much up to the mother of the babes these days. </p>
<p>In our family, we do have a situation that is close to twins being raised separately, and the coincidience in their lives is amazing. THings that do not have anything to do with deliberate choice. They went to similar schools, have similar jobs now, married women with similar names and the same birthday (but different years) and named their first sons the same name and they were born on the same day (different years). A bit eery.</p>
<p>We lived in the Middle East when my kids were little. One summer, after the last day of school, we flew to London to spend a few days before going home. We went to McDonals and sat in a table way in the back. My son, who was 4 told me that the little girl at the next table was in his class in school. I assumed that because she was Asian, that she just looked like a classmate until the mother said to me that her daughter had just told her that she and my son were in school together. So one day they are in class together and the next they are sitting in the same McDonalds in London at adjacent tables.</p>
<p>Same son went to school in a small town outside London. A few years later he met a friend at school here in Michigan whose parents told me they had lived in the next town over during the same two years we were there.</p>
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<p>Along those lines, I know a single mom who had a child by a donor father. They have a group of parents of donor number ### who get the kids together a few times per year so they can know their siblings.</p>
<p>(Anyone who knows me can identify me from this story.) </p>
<p>A few months ago, I was with my mom in NYC. It was gross and snowy; we waited forever for a cab. I spied one across the street, sprinted to it, and was getting in as a young woman also got in. My mom looked at her mom and said, “Do you want to share?” Her mom said “Sure; where are you going?” “Upper West Side.” “Us too! Let’s share!”</p>
<p>So we’re there, in the cab moving at approximately 4 feet per hour, and start talking. Oh, a pair of mothers and daughters, isn’t that funny. I asked where they were from.
Mother: Boston.
Me: I live in the suburbs!
Mother: We live in [name of my town]
Me: Where? I live across the street from the [name of train station stop]
Mother: We do too! We’re on [name of her street]</p>
<p>(I’ve since been to their house, which I can see from my house.)</p>
<p>This gets even more weird. So we keep chatting, talking about life in that suburb, etc. I eventually asked if the mother was from NY originally.</p>
<p>Mother: I grew up on the Upper East Side.
My mom: My aunt lived on [number] East [Street].
Mother: That’s the building I grew up in. We were on the third floor. </p>
<p>To top it all off, my mom and the mom in the cab graduated high school the same year.</p>
<p>Annoying one, DH and I share very similar SS numbers, like every alternate digit is the same. I know the first three digits are related to where you got your first SS#, so ours are the same, but this gets annoying…since i have to know his for insurance I get then mixed up. Sigh. Random annoyance.</p>
<p>26 years ago, I was at a party, and a friend of mine told me that he wanted to introduce me to another friend of his. He introduced me to this gorgeous guy, whom I grabbed, kissed and said, “Man, this guy is cute!” To which, our mutual friend was shocked…but we were laughing hysterically, because the cute guy was actually my boyfriend. </p>
<p>Married 25 years, maybe not a cosmic coincidence…but it still cracks me up to remember the shock on our friend’s face. And occasionally somebody still introduces me to my husband at work.</p>
<p>That is so funny busdriver.
I love doing stuff like that.</p>
<p>My father died, I had a 16 week miscarriage and our labrador who was part of our family for 16 years was born, all on the 16th of June.
( however, I was 17, not 16 when my dad died)</p>
<p>oh no, emerald. I don’t like sad cosmic coincidences like that :(. I hope something really great happens to you this June 16th.</p>
<p>Wow, some of this stories have me hearing the theme from the old Twilight Zone show. Spooky.</p>
<p>A friend tried to set me up with my very odd bachelor cousin (with best intentions). At least I had an easy out by saying we were first cousins. Once at a Chiese dinner with my brother and his buddies, when we had many women seated at our table and H and I were newly engaged, H looked around the table and whispered to me that he had dated all the women on our table except my younger sister. Fortunately he was on good terms with all, so there was no awkwardness. ;)</p>
<p>So my D and her fianc</p>
<p>When I was in high school, my family moved from my hometown to a large city several states away. In conversations, a friend of mine mentioned that her cousin lived in this city.</p>
<p>Very shortly after the move, my sister and I went to a party hosted by a new friend we’d made - she was the only person we know at the party and practically the only person we knew in this large city.</p>
<p>During the party, one of the hostess’ friends walked in, and my sister and I immediately turned to each other and said “That’s Rachel’s cousin.” And she was.</p>
<p>We had no reason to think that the cousin knew our new friend or that she would be at the party.</p>
<p>I was born in California. My family moved to two different states, then moved overseas when I was 5. </p>
<p>There was a war in the country we were living in, and we were evacuated to a different city in the country for safety, and had to move in with another family from the U.S. That family had a teen-age daughter who had a boyfriend (I was 10 yrs old at the time). We were all having dinner together (our family, our host family, and the boyfriend’s family) and turns out the boyfriend’s family used to live in California as well. Then it turned out the boyfriend’s father was the doctor who delivered me in California.</p>
<p>As a 10 yr old, instead of appreciating the cosmic coincidence, I was terribly embarrassed that this grown man had seen me naked.</p>
<p>^^^I love your 10-year-old self’s reaction!! Entirely understandable!</p>
<p>musicamusica - Fun fact, I have three degrees of Kevin Bacon.
</p>
<p>Also, I just remembered a story that is less than cosmic, but pretty coincidental. My fiance and I adopted a pair of cats over the summer, and one is a Himalayan. We took him to the vets because he had an upper respiratory infection, and the vet remarked that she had a friend who had a cat who looked just like him who had died of cancer. I then informed her of the fact that we were told our cats’ former owner had died of cancer. Yup. Same cat.</p>
<p>My grandmother’s uncle Hugh was killed in WWI on Nov 4, 1918.
Her brother Hugh (named for the uncle) was killed in WWII on Nov 4, 1943.</p>
<p>My aunt goes to her doctor’s appointment and they pull her chart–only it’s not hers as it turns out. Another patient has the exact same name–first, middle and last, and the exact same birth date except the year is off by one.</p>
<p>Many years ago, I shared a taxi with a random person to get from LaGuardia Airport into Manhattan. It turned out that she was going not only to the same neighborhood that I was, but to the same block, the same apartment building, and the same floor of that apartment building, to an apartment directly across the hall from mine, where she was visiting someone.</p>