Living With Multiples
With a new baby comes countless hours of joy and amazement—and an endless procession of changing diapers, giving bottles and checking on sleep monitors. Having one infant at home is hard, but having two, three or more brings a whole new set of challenges. For Jessica and Larry, parents to toddler triplet boys, the endless cycle of caretaking is intimately familiar. Born 12 weeks premature, Jack, Larry and Sean have provided an adventure from the get-go.
With developments in fertility treatments and the growth of assisted reproductive technologies (such as in vitro fertilization, or IVF, among others), multiple births like Jessica's are no longer uncommon. In this country, just over three percent of babies are born alongside siblings. Births of triplets or more are far less common than twins, rarely occurring spontaneously and most often associated with fertility treatments. And though the chance of becoming pregnant with multiples is still small, for those who do, life can kick into overdrive pretty quickly. That's Jessica's and Larry's story.
The Pregnancy and Delivery
Jessica underwent a treatment called controlled ovarian hyperstimulation (COH), where fertility medications are used to encourage a woman's ovaries to accelerate eggs to grow and mature. This was followed by intrauterine insemination (IUI), in which a concentrated sample of sperm is placed through the vagina and cervix directly into the uterus via a flexible catheter.