Becoming a parent is the most beautiful feeling in the world. Being told that you’ll welcome more than one baby at once is amazing!
But can you imagine being told that you are about to get four of them? Well, this happened to Jenny,35, and Chris Marr, when they went for the first ultrasound exam in November.
The initially become worried when they saw the strange look on the face of their doctor, so the mother asked if there was a problem:
“I was like, ‘Oh no, there’s no heartbeat.’ And, she’s like, ‘No, there is a heartbeat.’ She goes, ‘Y’all, there’s three babies in there.’ And we were just absolutely floored.”
A week later, when they went for a follow-up appointment at a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, the technician was even more puzzled!
Jenny explains that she was very cute, and said that she was not supposed to say that, but they “got four babies”!
Both of the parents were only children and did not have a history of multiple births in their families. Therefore, they were shocked.
Chris said:
“I made the joke that I am not coming back because there are going to be five babies next time. We were just shocked.
It’s unbelievable. It’ll never happen again in my career. I said, ‘Girl, go buy a few lottery tickets because those are the kind of odds we’re dealing with.”
According to their doctor, Murray, an OB-GYN at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, it is “a miracle”, as identical, spontaneous quadruplet births occur in 1 in 11 million or 1 in 15 million births”.
They found only 72 cases of it in published literature.
The future parents got scared when they learned that all the babies shared one placenta, and “the risk was that one of the babies can develop stronger and basically take away from the other babies.”
Murray added that, thankfully, everything went well, “here were no incidents on the sonogram even leading up to that where we were worried that one of them, or two or three of them, would be significantly smaller.”
Yet, giving birth to all of them in a time of pandemic became their next fear. Hospitals across the country were changing their policies due to the coronavirus crisis. Plus, when Marr was 28.5 weeks pregnant, labor started.
She said that “for the first time (during my pregnancy) I anticipated the worst.
However, on March 15, Marr, her husband, and mother all watched as the doctors at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas pulled their babies out.
In only three minutes, the world welcomed identical quadruplets Harrison Foy, Henry William, Hudson Perry, and Hardy Smith Marr.
The first-born Harrison weighed 2 pounds 6 ounces, the next brother, Hardy, came in at 2 pounds 10 ounces, the third, Henry weighed 2 pounds 6.7 ounces, while the youngest of them all, Hudson, was just 1 pound 15 ounces.
The parents called them “baby birds”, and they came home in early May, as three of them needed oxygen and all four stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit for about 10 weeks.
Chris says that they often find it difficult to tell the boys apart:
“They each have little bitty characteristics. When we sit down and look at them we can figure out who they are but if you just look at them from a distance, they all look the same. Thank God, Hudson’s a little smaller than everybody else and quieter.
It was a very surreal time and it’s one of those things that we will probably look back on in a couple of years, hopefully, when everything’s back to normal like, ‘Wow that was crazy!’ We just hope that this little story and our boys bring as much joy to everybody as they bring to us.”
You can follow the adventures of the family of 6 on Instagram in the “punny” titled account: themarrthemerrier!
Sources:
www.today.com
her.womenworking.com
www.dailymail.co.uk
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