06/09/2026
If you aren’t familiar with this story, this was the by which a well-known politician and government official and his spouse became parents, thanks to a loving birthmother’s choice for her twins’ future.
"In August 2021, when Pete and Chasten Buttigieg were brought into the room where their premature newborn twins were being cared for, Chasten later described the moment with a precision that made it clear he had replayed it many times since. 'They were like four and a half pounds,' he said in a 2024 interview with The Advocate, 'and I remember we walked into the room, we were just frozen, and the nurse said, Dads, you can hold them.' The twins, Penelope Rose and Joseph August, known in the family as Gus, had arrived earlier than expected, and the weeks that followed unfolded inside the specific rhythm of a neonatal unit, with both fathers present and both fathers also managing the demands of lives that had not stopped for the arrival. Pete was serving as the 19th United States Secretary of Transportation at the time, a cabinet position requiring his attention across multiple concurrent national challenges. Gus developed a severe RSV respiratory infection in the months after coming home, and Pete described the experience in a TIME magazine interview in March 2023: 'Sometimes I would have to take my laptop into the bathroom of Gus's ICU room, close the door, and then put a virtual background on Zoom.' On October 31, 2021, two months after the twins arrived, Chasten posted a photograph on Instagram of Pete holding baby Gus dressed in a traffic cone costume, captioning it: 'Happy Halloween from these twinfrastructure safety advocates.' The post then turned candid, with Chasten adding that they were spending that Halloween in the hospital, that Gus had been having a rough time but they were headed in the right direction. Both fathers had spoken publicly about the adoption process with unusual specificity. In an April 2025 appearance on the Flagrant podcast, Pete described what the experience had revealed about race in American adoption: 'Anybody who says race is not a thing in this country should experience an adoption process. There are literally different lists if you say that you want a white kid only versus if you say that does not matter. The list for white kids is longer.' He added: 'We did not know anything about the racial identity of the kids until they started to look mixed race, which they are.' Chasten published a children's book titled I Sailed Alone: A Story About Adoption, describing the family's path to parenthood for young readers. Pete read Gus and Penelope bedtime stories specifically about transportation in the years that followed their arrival. He told TIME: 'You have got to stop for a second to realize that these are some of the best and most important parts of your life.' Pete left the Transportation Department in January 2025, as the Biden administration concluded, and the family moved forward with four-year-old twins who had begun their lives at four and a half pounds in a room where two fathers stood frozen until a nurse told them they could hold them."
