The first pregnancy ultrasound for expectant parents is always a joy. To see and hear that baby heartbeat for the first time is a wonderful moment as suddenly the pregnancy feels ‘real’.
When first-time parents Kristen and Tom Hewitt headed along to their first ultrasound appointment they got an incredible surprise as they discovered they were pregnant with not one, not two, but three babies.
“The tech doing the ultrasound was very quiet and I knew the image didn’t look like I expected it to,” Kristen wrote in her online blog.
“After a little more silence Tom joked and asked if there were more than one baby in there. The tech replied, ‘Yes… Actually there are three,'” the mother-of-three wrote of the moment she learned she was pregnant with triplets.
“Stunned, excited and petrified are the best emotions I can use to explain how we felt.”
The proud parents from Baltimore in the U.S. later found out they were pregnant with three identical boys.
The triplets were a spontaneous conception, the result of a very rare incidence. The odds of naturally conceiving identical triplets are one in two million and occurs when a single fertilised egg splits into three.
After eight months of pregnancy Kristen and Tom welcomed their healthy baby boys on October 6. The three boys were born via caesarean at 33 weeks after Kristen’s water broke and went into labour while she was in hospital on bed rest.
The three identical brothers were born one minute apart and named Thomas, Finnegan and Oliver weighing between three and five pounds. Their parents have already affectionately nicknamed them Trip, Finn and Ollie.
Despite their premature arrival, which is normal for a multiple birth, the boys only spent two weeks in neonatal care and are now home with their parents.
Now the question that everyone is asking is how do you tell identifical triplets apart?! Kristen and Tom wrote on their blog that each baby has been assigned particular coloured clothes to wear.
After much thought they decided that Trip will wear gray as his ‘primary’ colour with white, and red as his secondary colours. Finn will mainly wear green clothes with some yellow, and Ollie will wear mostly blue, with some orange.
“These colors will help us tremendously. You try identifying three separate identical boys at 3am after no sleep,” they explained.
The busy parents also plan to give the boys unique haircuts as they grow older to help distinguish the look-alike brothers.
