Katie Craw, 26, from Pentre Maelor, Wales, said she and partner Rob Ellis almost fainted when they were told their second child had actually turned three during the 12-week scan. Usually triplets are not identical and are produced when two eggs are fertilized and one goes on to develop into twins. By naturally giving birth to identical triplets, they overcame the extraordinary 200 million to one odds and instantly doubled her family’s size.
When a fertilized egg breaks into triplets after conception, Katie is one of the few women in the UK to give birth to identical triplets, or monozygotes. When I found out I was pregnant with triplets, I thought, “We can’t afford a big car or a bigger house. However, my mistress informed me that everything occurs for a purpose and that these are the hand you have been dealt by life. My mistress, though, assured me that everything happens for a purpose and that these are the hand you’ve been dealt by life.
When they start trying for a second time, the couple already has a four-year-old boy named Jacob who they want to send to school. Thankfully, Katie is now two months pregnant, and they are eagerly getting ready to welcome a new baby brother or sister. But following a year of checkups at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, the neighborhood hospital, they were about to experience the biggest shock of their lives. Katie wasn’t as far along as she had imagined and was actually just eight weeks along with not one, but three babies.
They told us about all the complications but they said you can still have three healthy children. Two weeks later, the couple returned for another scan and discovered that the babies all had their own bags of fluid. Her pregnancy went well, the babies developed well. But when she was 26 weeks pregnant, the doctors started to worry, at 28 weeks she started having contractions. But fortunately, she kept the babies in her belly until 32 weeks, and performed a caesarean section
On February 9, babies born with a birth weight Tommy 17.50 weighed 2lbs 11.5oz, Joshua 17.51 weighed 3lbs 4.5oz and Eddie 17.52 weighed 3lbs 3.5oz.
The following day, Eddie followed Tommy and Joshua in being sent to Glan Clwyd Hospital in Bodelwyddan. After a week, Katie was released from treatment, and she stayed with her parents for an additional two weeks before the facility was forced to close as the coronavirus pandemic spread across Britain.
Fortunately, Josh and Eddie only needed to be in the hospital for close to seven weeks, and Tommy returned home on April 10 – the first day the entire family was together – ten days after Josh and Eddie. It’s been difficult not having all of us together, Katie enthused. When I was genuinely alone, I thought I would never see this day.
‘We really do feel so lucky. They say it takes a village to raise a child and it’s so true,’ Katie added.
