When Lindsay Hay’s viral Instagram post popped up on my feed a few days ago, I couldn’t stop staring at it in awe. It was an “in and out” image, showing herself pregnant, and then with her healthy babies — four of them! It was proof the human body is sometimes capable of far more than we can dream of.
“I carried these sweet babies for 30 weeks and 4 days on the inside and here they are at 30 weeks and 4 days on the outside!” Hay wrote last month on the post that now has 71,000 likes. “Full hands, full heart is an understatement!”
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Hay has been documenting the growth of her quads, Caiden Michael, Madison Grace, Lucas William, and Grayson James, since she first announced to her friends and family that she was pregnant with them. She also recently spoke to Buzzfeed about how she came to be so “blessed.”
Hay and her husband, Syman Hay, already had 4-year-old son Carson, but then she suffered several miscarriages. Her doctors told her that she had poor egg quality and put her on a hormone drug called Follistim.
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“The theory behind the drugs was that if I produced more than one egg each cycle, I’d ‘catch’ a good one faster,” Hay told Buzzfeed. “We were to try this, plus timed intercourse six times, before moving on to IVF. I conceived the quads on Cycle 3 of this treatment.”
After losing other pregnancies, she was nervous about this one. She was also sicker than we can imagine.
“During the first trimester, I was so sick I couldn’t function,” she said. “With four babies and four placentas, my hormones, fatigue, and nausea were quadrupled. I was extremely anxious and would wait until midnight every night to celebrate making it through another day.”
Though her placenta started to thin at 20 weeks, her quads stayed in there until 30 weeks and four days. Since she lives an hour away from the hospital, her doctor advised her to spend her last week at the hospital.
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“After a lot of crying I realized it truly was the best for everyone and sucked it up,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “I don’t ever want to sugar coat anything or come off as this badass warrior who can handle everything that comes my way with a smile.”
Their birth by C section was “incredible” she said. “They all came out kicking and screaming and breathing on their own, and their cries alone made it all worth it,” she wrote later.
The babies had to stay in the NICU for seven weeks, but after a couple weeks, they were already off of breathing assistance and getting their nutrients all from their mama’s breast milk. To which we say, WOW. To this day, she still breastfeeds all four. And just look at these amazing kids.
As you can imagine, quadruplets are pretty rare, especially now that IVF treatment does not typically involve implanting multiple embryos. Of the 3,791,712 live births recorded in the U.S. in 2018, per the CDC, only 115 were quadruplets (and 10 were quintuplets or more).
Often mothers will opt to have their fetuses reduced to twins or singletons, to decrease the health risks to the fetuses and the mother. This is every woman’s individual choice, and we’re happy that the Hays made the decision that was right for their family.
It also looks like Lindsay Hay is thriving as a mother of five.
“They have surpassed every hope and dream I had envisioned during my pregnancy and even though time is passing quickly I know the best is yet to be,” she wrote in her viral post. “Behind these babies are new marks, rolls, and skin you can’t see but they also came with new strengths I didn’t have before either. We have been so BLESSED and I won’t ever let myself take this life for granted.”
Enjoy these photos of what childbirth really looks like.
