Quadruplets to Start Coming Home in Shifts

Al and Karen Miner thought they would have a couple of weeks to prepare a nursery after the birth of their quadruplets. As it turns out, they only have a matter of days.

One by one, their babies will be going home from the hospital sooner than expected. The first will be home on Tuesday.

Knowing their hands will be full, literally, the Miners have been spending the last few days organizing their four-bedroom home in Orange for a house full of babies.

“We’re having the family come over to help us prepare,” Al Miner said. “Knowing that time will be very precious for us, we’re spending the next few days getting ourselves organized. We do have diapers. We’re not totally organized with food yet, but we will be. We have to take inventory of what we do have and what we still need.”

The Miner quadruplets were born one week ago today, eight weeks early. To monitor the development of multiple premature babies, the hospital staff usually keeps the babies for a few weeks or even months, according to Dr. Manuel Porto, director of maternal-fetal medicine at UCI Medical Center in Orange.

Because the quadruplets are progressing at different levels, each will be released at different times.

Three of the babies--Brianna, Whitney and Vincent--were born healthy and bigger than most quadruplets, he said. One, Jeffrey, was born with a lung-fluid problem but is now in fair condition.

The quadruplets, all clad Friday in white beanies, booties, diapers and T-shirts embroidered with their names, were reunited on Valentine’s Day when Jeffrey was released from intensive care to the intermediate nursery.

“I don’t know if I have gotten used to holding both of them in my arms, but it sure feels good,” said Karen Miner as she rocked two of the children near her husband, who was holding the other two. After 59 days in the hospital, Karen Miner, 32, was discharged Thursday.

The infants were the first quadruplets born in Orange County, and the second such birth in California, through the fertility technique know as GIFT, gamete intra-Fallopian transfer. The method involves the woman’s eggs being placed with the man’s sperm in her Fallopian tube. Four eggs were used to increase the chances of pregnancy for the Miners.

The couple said they were shocked when they were told last summer that they were going to become the parents of quadruplets.

“I laughed,” said Al Miner, a 34-year-old management consultant. “I don’t know if the reality has struck me yet. Ask me in six months.”

“I was devastated and shocked,” said Karen, a second-grade school teacher in Fullerton. “We wanted a child and we were blessed with four. We’ll make the best of it.”

It is still hard to identify each infant, said Karen, but each is starting to develop his or her own characteristics.

“It’s hard,” she said. “But, I can tell Jeffrey because he has the blond hair and Brianna because she is the smallest.”