Rubbing her tummy while still shaking her head in disbelief, this overjoyed and somewhat overwhelmed mum-of-one can only laugh at her rapidly growing girth.
“I’m just 14 weeks pregnant, but I look as big as when I was six months with my daughter,” giggles Natalie Te Aroha, as she recalls her first pregnancy with 22-month-old Kiana.
News of a second, much-longed-for baby came just weeks ago. But at the pregnancy scan, things took a different direction for Natalie, 30, and her husband of eight years, Kahn, 33.
“When the sonographer started scanning my tummy, I immediately saw two sacs and started crying because I thought we were having twins,” says Natalie, a personal trainer from Roebourne, north of Perth.
Natalie and Kahn were overwhelmed by the news.
(Photography: Jessica Oud)The thought of two babies was overwhelming for the happy parents, who’d taken two years to fall pregnant with Kiana.
“I cried, too,” adds Kahn, who works in law enforcement. “I’d always wanted three kids.”
As the scanner probed further around the nervous mother’s stomach, the technician looked up and asked, “How many do you think you’re having?”
“I had no idea, but asked, ‘Are there three?’ He shook his head, held up four fingers and my jaw dropped in disbelief,” says Natalie.
It was also a big shock for Kahn.
“My tears immediately turned to fears,” he admits. “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 our own basketball team!'”
Kiana is about to have 4 younger siblings.
(Photography: Jessica Oud)After trying naturally to conceive, Natalie was diagnosed with anovulation, a condition where the body produces eggs but they don’t release, and had to use an egg stimulating hormone to solve the problem.
“Then when we found out there were four, we were advised to ‘reduce’ to two, to give them the best chance of survival,” reveals Natalie. “Of course, we’d never do that to our babies.”
Go to “Kiki and the quads” to follow the quadruplets’ journey on Facebook and Instagram.four little miracles!
