Real-life reads
More to love: “We can’t wait to meet our quads”; Hearing-loss teen’s hard lesson; Couple’s pet cemetery
After two decades with no Kiwi quadruplets, we’re ready to welcome our second set in two years! Rubbing her belly and shaking her head, Natalie Te Aroha can only but laugh at her rapidly growing girth. “I’m 14 weeks pregnant but I look as big as when I was six months with my daughter,” she giggles nervously, recalling her first pregnancy with Kiana, now 22 months old.
“The size of my belly is starting to really worry me. I wasn’t even showing at this point last time!” she admits to Woman’sDay, when we catch up in Auckland’s Waitakere while the family holidays in Aotearoa – what will be their last trip home from Oz to see whanau for some time.
News of a second, much longed-for pregnancy came just weeks ago, but during a scan to measure how far on she was, things went a little skew-whiff for Natalie, 30, and her Kiwi husband of eight years, Kahn, 33.
“When the sonographer started scanning my tummy, I immediately began crying because I could see there were two sacs sitting side by side in my uterus, and I guessed we were having twins,” recalls Natalie, a personal trainer, who now lives in Roebourne, 16 hours north of Perth, in Western Australia. “It confirmed the suspicions I had going into the scan, because I’d been really sick and my blood hormone levels were sky high. I’d even told Kahn this was my last pregnancy because I was just too sick.”
The Te Aroha family will no doubt find much in common with Kendall and Joshua MacDonald, who welcomed our other Kiwi quads in August 2018. The MacDonalds from Timaru have three gorgeous girls and a boy – Indie, Quinn, Molly and Hudson – siblings for big brother Brooklyn, five.
Expectant mum Natalie says the prospect of conceiving two babies was overwhelming for her and her husband, who’d taken two years to fall pregnant with their beloved daughter Kiana.
“I cried too,” admits a strapping Kahn, who works in law enforcement. “I’d always wanted three kids, so for me it was a dream come true.”
At the scan, as the technician probed further around the Natalie’s belly, he paused, looked up and asked, “How many do you think you’re having?”
“I had no idea but asked, ‘Are there three?’” says Natalie.
“He shook his head and held up four fingers. My jaw dropped in disbelief.”
For Kahn, too, the news didn’t
compute. He says, “My tears immediately turned to fears. I literally lost my stomach, like you do when you’re on a rollercoaster. Then I laughed and thought, ‘Of course something like this would happen to us. First, we can’t have kids and now by June, we’ll have a basketball team!’”
The trip home in the car was in near-silence as the dumbfounded duo digested their likely front-page news.
“I didn’t know what to think,” explains Natalie. “I was shocked, overwhelmed and scared. I still am!”
After trying naturally to get pregnant, the mum-of-one was initially diagnosed with “unexplained infertility”, before the condition was more accurately labelled anovulation, where the body produces eggs but they don’t release.
“It was demoralising,” she tells. “All of our friends were falling pregnant and after two years, we thought, ‘Why isn’t it working for us?’”
Adds Kahn, who met his future wife at his mother’s gym: “Our marriage suffered. We lived in the same house but stopped communicating. We loved each other but passed like ships in the night. I suppose we had no idea about how to deal with not getting pregnant.”
An egg-stimulating hormone was prescribed and d Natalie began self-injecting. g. She was advised there was a very small chance of a multiple pregnancy.
After a few cycles, es, it worked ... and some!
“But doctors don’t n’t like it when this happens,” ns,” confesses super-fit t Natalie. “We’ve also been asked twice since about ‘selectively selectively reducing’ to two, which gives the surviving pair a better chance of making it through.
“But of course we’d never do that to our babies. es. It actually made me upset to hear an expert recommend ommend we get rid of two of f them.”
The delighted couple ouple have quite separate e fears when they talk about out the road ahead.
Natalie is concerned rned about failing in her duty to get four babies to a healthy y birth, while Kahn is anxious about bout how he’ll spread the love ve when there are so many.
“How do I do that at with five kids?” says the already eady devoted dad, who sings “Pokarekare okarekare Ana” to Kiana as she he goes to bed each night. “I don’t want any of them ever thinking, hinking, ‘Dad doesn’t love me.’
“But on the bright ht side, I think it could have been harder – at least there are not five in there, eh!”