Never in a million years can you be prepared to hear that you’re expecting quintuplets. I know that because that’s exactly what we were told on January 27, 2009. Your life is forever altered!

Up to this point, I would say that you could describe us as a couple of “normal” (and those who know us know that I use that term loosely! ☺) Midwestern kids. Heath and I (Angela) both grew up in small town Iowa; Heath from Rock Rapids and me from Tama. We met in college in 1996 at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls (Go Panthers!), graduated in December of 2000 and were married on September 29, 2001. After getting married, we lived in the Milwaukee/Racine Wisconsin area for five years. In January 2007, we relocated to River Falls, Wisconsin, and that’s where we lay our heads at night.

We battled infertility for years and eventually decided that we would forgo any aggressive fertility treatments. What we really wanted was to be parents, and it didn’t matter to us if the child(ren) were biological or not. We started the adoption process in 2005 to adopt a child through international adoption from South Korea. In April 2007, as we continued to wait for our adoption referral, we found out that we were pregnant! We were truly shocked and viewed this as our “miracle” baby. Our daughter Meredith Grace was born on November 6, 2007 and our world was turned upside down. We were truly over the moon and knew right away that we wanted to try to have another child. At least at this point we took comfort in the fact that it was possible for us to get pregnant and carry to term.

Family planning hasn’t exactly worked for our family, and we had no idea how long it would take us to conceive again. We were fairly certain, however, that the likelihood of our getting pregnant again without medical help was slim. Since I was diagnosed years ago with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, we knew that lack of ovulation was the infertility issue we were battling. After attempting to use the oral medication Clomid again to no avail, our doctor suggested that we try Follistim (an injectible medication used to stimulate ovulation) and our insurance approved. We did one round of that fertility medication. I guess you could say that it worked…a little too well perhaps. We knew before we started that there was a chance of having multiples; we just never thought we would be in that 1% to conceive quads or more.