A Florida mom was in disbelief on learning she was expecting triplets after losing three babies to miscarriages.
Back in November 2018, Christine Taala of Miami—already a mom to a preteen and a newborn baby—was extremely worried, thinking how she was going to care for five kids, and she feared the worst.
Yet her mother’s comforting words that it might be God’s way of giving her back the three babies she had lost assured her to courageously proceed with her pregnancy.
Today, Christine’s triplets are a testament to hope.
“Things happen for a reason, we don’t know exactly why they happen, but eventually we will know why,” Christine told The Epoch Times in an interview.
Christine, 35, met her husband Talmage, 37, hiking in Las Vegas in late 2015. The couple got engaged in April 2016 and married the following year.
During the period between December 2015 and March 2017, Christine had two miscarriages. She gave birth to their first daughter, Mila, in January 2018. Yet in August the same year, the new mom was hospitalized, pregnant again, and miscarrying.
Still grieving her third miscarriage, news of her spontaneous triplet pregnancy in November 2018 was hard to take in. At 10 weeks pregnant, her doctor suggested a fetal reduction to increase survival odds. Her pregnancy was high-risk, but Christine couldn’t reconcile with losing one of her babies.
With the moral support of her mother, Christine gradually regained hope and believed that the divines planned her to be a mom of triplets for a purpose. She had an epiphany: her babies were neither a punishment nor a test, they were her reason to be.
Christine’s case was a rare double pregnancy from two separate eggs; identical twins A and B were conceived a week after baby C, who was a fraternal child.
To add to the excitement, Christine, her husband, and her 11-year-old and 9-month-old daughters learned in a special gender reveal held at Walt Disney World that they would be welcoming three baby girls.
All seemed well until Christine’s perinatologist noticed baby A had stopped growing. Sharing an umbilical cord with baby B, she wasn’t getting enough nutrients.
After a procedure to rectify the blood flow at Children’s Hospital of Texas, Christine held on until March 28, 2019, before going into labor at 26 weeks. She gave birth the following day with the help of a team of 25 experts. All three babies were whisked to the NICU—one needed to be resuscitated and two were intubated—while Christine was held back to recover from a fever.
“Nervous and excited,” she saw her baby girls for the first time three days later.
“We had to wash our hands and then we approached each incubator,” she said. “I was terrified to touch them, they looked so fragile, their bodies were pure bones and skin.”
The triplets’ first 15 days in the NICU were the scariest days of Christine’s life. Baby A had a hole in her heart and hemangiomas in her liver, baby B had a less severe hole in her heart, and baby C had a stage 4 brain bleed. Christine became a “WebMD master,” researching everything.
Doctors’ prognoses were pessimistic until the babies took a turn for the better three weeks in. The little fighters began to gain weight and their oxygen levels normalized.
For 103 days, the hospital was the family’s second home. Until finally, on July 2, 2019, two babies went home, followed closely by their sister.
After so many months of stress, Christine, a healthcare worker, suffered PTSD. The triplets—Aria, Lilah, and Sienna—suffered episodes of sleep apnea and one caught a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), sending them briefly back to the hospital.
Christine said that trying to balance work, kids, schedules, meals, diapers, and screaming toddlers was the “second most challenging” thing. Prioritizing to look after their baby girls, Talmage joined in to help his beloved wife, and the family found its equilibrium.
“My husband, I think, was made to be a triplet dad!” she said. “He can stay calm when I am falling apart ... I truly think we have learned to be a team, as this is no one-parent job.”
Watching her affectionate trio grow up together is the highlight of triplet parenting for Christine. Her thriving girls, now toddlers, confirm her theory that everything happens for a reason.
“I am a firm believer of that saying as I look at all the ups and downs we went through,” she said. “Somehow it made us stronger human beings, but also stronger parents and a couple.”
“The triplets are these miracle babies,” she told The Epoch Times. “You see the girls today, they push every step of the way. I see how accomplished they are, how proud that they learn a new task or skill each day. They are our heroes!”
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