After trying to have a child for 17 years, a couple has welcomed sextuplets.
They're going to need their own bus.
After trying for nearly two decades to have a baby, a Virginia couple now has six of them — three girls and three boys, the first sextuplets ever delivered at Children's Hospital of Richmond.
Aideboye and Ajibola Taiwo welcomed their half dozen offspring on May 11, attended by a 40-person medical team. The babies were delivered by Cesarean section at 30 weeks.
They range in weight from one pound, 10 ounces to two pounds, 15 ounces.
All are doing well in the medical center’s neonatal intensive care unit.
The couple, who hail from Nigeria, heard four heartbeats at their first ultra sound in November. But when the mother began receiving health care at the children’s hospital in January, the parents-to-be were told there were actually six heartbeats.
“I was excited,” the new father said. “For the first very first time, we were expecting."
Read: Quadruplet Brothers All Get Accepted to Elite Colleges, Including Harvard and Yale
And there was a lot to expect. Doctors, nurses, and other medical staff ran practice drills for the spontaneous arrival of six premature babies.
“We’re going through this extraordinary journey together with the family,” said Dr. Ronald Ramus, the hospital’s director of maternal and fetal medicine. "It’s not every day that parents bring home sextuplets. Mrs. Taiwo was eating, sleeping and breathing for seven.”
The babies’ father said, “We are far from home but the medical team is our family. That is what got us this far.”
The parents are now visiting their brood in the NICU, holding them in skin-to-skin chest embraces that remind them of being in the womb and bonding them with their mom and dad.
Watch: Couple Welcomes Quadruplets After Struggling to Conceive for Years
