PHOENIX -- The Fisher family in Tucson, Ariz., is a typical family of four, but how they came to be one is anything but. Dad, Keith, is a software engineer. His wife Amy is a stay-at-home mom taking care of 4-year-old Madilyn and 6-year-old Samantha.

Here's where it gets interesting. Samantha was adopted almost two years before she was even born.

"At one point, we thought we'd never have kids!" said Keith Fisher.

"She was chosen for us," said Amy.

If you're doing the math, it's true, most pregnancies last about 9 months, but not Samantha's. Her biological parents went through in-vitro fertilization and wound up with triplets. After growing to a family of six, they decided to put their remaining embryos up for adoption, helping the Fishers start a family.

The Fishers put together a scrapbook of their pregnancy with pictures and a story to help Samantha understand how she came to be.

"We tell her that Mommy and Daddy didn't have seeds to start a baby, and you need seeds, so we found a family who gave us extra seeds," said Amy Fisher.

Samantha was frozen five years before she became one of the first 20 babies in the country born through embryo adoption in 2002. It's believed there are some 400,000 embryos frozen in storage across the country right now.

"For some people, the whole point of their life is to have a child," said Dr. Kim Pomeroy, an embryologist with Arizona Reproductive Medicine Specialists.

He said more couples that use in-vitro to get pregnant now have to decide what to do with their remaining fertilized eggs. Even so, there are only believed to be about a half-dozen other families like the Fishers in Arizona.

The Fishers learned about the Nightlight Embryo Adoption program online.

Gilbert residents Jen and Todd Wright have also turned to embryo adoption.

Jen keeps an Internet journal to try to help educate other couples dealing with infertility. A recent entry began

The babies are coming, the babies are coming! Our 12 precious embryos will be shipping here next week via FedEx, more efficient than the stork!

"We feel like we're the parents of 12 children already, and they're just waiting for us!" said Wright.

Todd Wright said the only difference is that he gets more than the usual nine months to figure out all he has to learn before their baby arrives.

"I'm a dad in training," he said.

Like the Fishers, the Wrights have an open adoption, which means they can exchange letters, phone calls and photos with the donor family.

But it doesn't have to be that involved. The Snowflake program matches families based on their wishes and any personal preferences, like religion. Jen Wright said their donor family picked them, in part, because they were a married Christian couple, "They believe that these are precious frozen lives, and we do too."

Wright said it broke her heart to hear Nadya Suleman, the mother of the California octuplets, say she had to implant all of her embryos, because the only other option would have been to destroy them.

"Their only options are not having kazillion kids at once or killing your embryos!" Wright exclaimed. "There is another option, and families need to know about it."

The Wrights said even if Suleman wished to ultimately implant all of her embryos, she could have done it in pairs, as they recently did, minimizing the risk to the babies and mother-to-be.

Jen Wright doesn't pretend the decision to give up an embryo is an easy one to make.

"I still don't know if I could do it," she said.

She and Todd recently miscarried, and they said the loss is only made more bearable with the hope they have for their children yet to be born. Still, they're not quite sure what they would do if they wound up with a full house and extra embryos frozen in storage. Their plan is to implant and care for them all, but they say it's in God's hands.

That's a dilemma the Fishers didn't have. After a failed attempt implanting the first three of their seven adopted embryos, Samantha, was one of the remaining four that took.

Two years later the Fishers got pregnant with Madilyn.

Even though embryo adoption has been around about a decade now, there is still no legislation that deals with it specifically, so it falls under property law. The adoptions are bound by contracts, but prospective families do have to go through as extensive a screening and certification process as a traditional adoption

Nevertheless, it costs less than a traditional adoption and in-vitro fertilization.

"You're giving someone a gift, and not only are you giving them a gift -- you're giving those embryos a chance at life," said Amy Fisher.