When it rains, it pours, as they say. Initially unable to have children, one couple suddenly had three and then three more!
When they got married, Courtney and Philip Garrett of New Orleans knew that they wanted children. But after several years of trying, it just wasn’t happening. So the couple turned to in vitro fertilization (IVF). If Courtney needed a “test tube baby” to get pregnant, so be it. That procedure went well, in fact, unexpectedly so: she was pregnant with triplets! The doctor had implanted two fertilized eggs: both of them took and one of them split. Courtney and Philip were overjoyed to welcome Oliver, Jack, and Ellie into the world.
Raising three children was a lot of work, especially for parents who each had a job. But with some help from a nanny, they managed. After seven years, Courtney and Philip wanted just one more child. Again, they went with IVF.
If having triplets the first time was a huge surprise, imagine how they reacted to hearing that they were expecting triplets again! The way it happened this time was far more unusual. The same month the IVF procedure was done, Courtney had also conceived naturally! Then, one of the eggs split. The result: identical twin boys plus a sister.
It was an incredibly rare medical miracle. A local TV station doing a story on the Garretts did some research and could only find one other case of triplets who had been conceived both naturally and artificially.
The video posted below will introduce you to the Garrett family, all eight of them! The first three kids’ reaction to their surprise present is really funny. Each of the first triplets was later assigned one of the new triplets to watch over especially carefully, effectively serving as their guardian angel.
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