You won’t believe your eyes when you look at the photos.
Chris and Jenny Marr were both 34 when they decided it was time to start a family. They weren’t planning a big family, and they would have been happy with just one baby. But fate had other plans for their lives.
Jenny became pregnant naturally and as neither of them had a family history of twins, they were not prepared for what they saw at their first ultrasound.
Identical quadruplets
Jenny and Chris had their first ultrasound scan when Jenny was 10 weeks pregnant. When they found out that there was not one but several babies inside, the husband turned white as a sheet and almost fainted – even though the sonographer had only detected three embryos on the screen. The fourth baby was only revealed in the next scan.
It later turned out that they were not just naturally conceived quadruplets, but identical quadruplets, so rare that only 72 cases, or 288 children in total, have been recorded in the medical literature. The four Marr babies were born healthy, albeit with low weight, after a pregnancy that was as unproblematic as possible.
The boys, of course, spent many weeks in the neonatal unit. A complicating factor was that they arrived on 15 March 2020 – 28 weeks into the pregnancy – just as the first closures due to Covid were taking place, which was an added worry.
The babies were given four similar-sounding first names by their parents: Harrison, Hardy, Henry and Hudson. Mother Jenny Marr has been sharing her experiences with the babies on her Instagram page themarrthemerrier since the beginning of the pregnancy.
Monozygotic quadruplets are born when a fertilized egg splits and then both cells split again. The chance of this happening naturally is about 1 in 15 million.
Today, Harrison, Hardy, Henry and Hudson are strong, healthy, mischievous three-year-olds who, in addition to all the work and chores, bring their parents a lot of joy.
Check out more cute twin photos!
The twins don’t know what it’s like not to have a sibling, having been bonded from the moment of conception, as the following ultrasound images show.