Conjoined Twins Married: CT Couple’s Story

NEW MILFORD — When conjoined twins Carmen and Lupita Andrade were 8 years old, staff at Northville Elementary School described them as happy, healthy and adventurous.

Carmen was more outgoing; Lupita more reserved, but both girls were “willing to try almost anything,” school physical therapist Julie Cardoso said at the time.

Now 25, the twins, who still live in New Milford, said in a recent interview they like to hike, fish, travel and create content for their YouTube channel. Lupita also is working on comedy writing.

The biggest change in their lives in the past several years was Carmen’s marriage to Daniel McCormack in October 2024. The two met on a dating app, Carmen said.

The twins are quick to say that Carmen is married to Daniel; Lupita is not.

“I am very adamant that I am not,” Lupita said. “I am aromantic and asexual. I am not looking for anyone, ever.”

Asked how she handles her sister’s intimate moments with McCormack, Lupita said, “I mind my own business.”

Joined at the torso, each woman has two arms. They share some internal organs and two legs. Carmen drives (a Ford F-150 pickup truck) “because I have the right leg,” she said in a recent interview.

Conjoined twins occur once in every 50,000 to 60,000 births, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where doctors have separated 32 sets of the rare twins and managed care of others who could not be separated. About 70% of conjoined twins are female, and most are stillborn.

The Andrade twins were born in a hospital in Veracruz, Mexico that had no facilities for their care. Their parents, Norma Solis and Victor Andrade, connected with Healing the Children Northeast, a New Milford-based nonprofit that specializes in bringing medical care to children, or when needed, the children to the care.

In 2001, Healing the Children brought the infant twins to New Milford. At the time, they had a severe bronchial infection and collectively weighed about 22 pounds. The group then helped the family, which includes their older sister, Abigail, to move to town. The twins received medical care to get well and the physical therapy they needed to get mobile.

Because each twin controls each leg separately, they’ve had to learn to coordinate their steps. Because those two legs carry two torsos, the muscles had to be strong enough to carry the extra weight. Carmen Andrade said in the recent interview they first walked at age 4, but it took years of physical therapy to walk easily.

Through fundraisers and extra attention to their education and welfare, the town of New Milford has embraced the twins. Norma Solis told a reporter in 2007 she loved New Milford.

The twins’ YouTube Channel is titled, “Carmen and Lupita.” In their videos, the sisters joke around and don’t shy from answering viewers’ questions about their inseparable lives. In a Q&A posted on the channel when they were 19, they were asked if it hurts when one tries to move, but the other stays still.

“No, not at all,” Carmen said, “because we’re not trying to split apart or something.”

“Chainsaw … or glue remover,” Lupita says.

“Guys, don’t tell anybody,” Carmen says, “but the only reason we’re stuck together is because of glue — Elmer’s glue, they sponsor us.”

A later video features a Q&A with the twins and McCormack, a New York state native, after he and Carmen had been together for about 1 1/2 years, but before they married.

Asked about his first impressions of Carmen, McCormack looked at her and said, “You are a lot shorter than I thought you were going to be. Danny DeVito is taller than Carmen. That’s a fun fact. I mean it might not be fun for you, but it’s pretty fun for me.”

Do Daniel and Lupita get along?

“Yeah, I hate him,” Lupita says, with a half smile.

The two have a running schtick, ribbing and rolling their eyes at each other.

McCormack also revealed in that video that Carmen “snores like a freight train rolling by.”

Another question from that session: Who said “I love you” first?

Carmen said she did and that McCormack was her first boyfriend.

The twins attended New Milford public schools until eighth grade and then went to Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, graduating in 2018.

After graduation, Carmen said, “I got pretty far into a veterinary tech program, but I ran out of money and patience.”

The sisters sometimes work as tour guides at an alpaca farm in upstate New York, she said.

McCormack, who did not want to be interviewed, works as a radio technician for a company in New York state, Carmen Andrade said. He lives with the twins, their older sister and their parents in New Milford.

Carmen said she does not want children.

“I don’t have the patience for child-raising,” she said.

Asked how she and her sister are different, Carmen said she’s more vocal, while Lupita is relatively reserved, but also opinionated and “determined.” They bickered as kids, Carmen said, but those divisions subsided.

When they were first-graders, the twins traveled with their parents to Los Angeles in 2007 to appear on model Tyra Banks’s talk show, they said. A woman from Canada with 3-month-old conjoined twins was a guest on the show that day, along with 18-year-old twins who had been successfully separated. Meeting the other guests was “wonderful,” Norma, the twins’ mother, said at the time

Asked on the show what they wanted to be when they grew up, Lupita said a firefighter and Carmen said a veterinarian.

Asked Sunday about the biggest change in their lives since Carmen got married, Lupita said, “Our dynamic hasn’t changed much.”

“The world decided to blow itself up,” Carmen added. “Not much more than that, to be honest.”