Garden Grove Couple Have 4 Bundles of Joy

With help from fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization, Maura and Leo Lomeli are now the parents of quadruplets.

Miriam, 4 pounds, 1 ounce, was delivered by caesarean section at 10:24 a.m. Sunday at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center. Her three brothers--Steven, 4 pounds, 3 ounces; Eric, 4 pounds, 11 ounces; and Leo, 4 pounds, 10 ounces--followed at 10:25 a.m.

“I was scared and happy at the same time when I found out I was going to have four kids,” said Maura Lomeli, 30.

The babies are in incubators--standard procedure for multiple births--and are well, said Dr. Leonel Guajardo, a neonatologist who assisted with the delivery, his first experience with quads.

“I have been on triplets,” Guajardo said. Quads are “a little bit smaller.”

The Lomeli quads are the second healthy set born at the Fountain Valley hospital since it opened in the early 1970s, said Kathleen O’Brien, hospital spokeswoman. The first were born to Dong Xuan Pham and wife Kim Thuy Khuat last year.

The Garden Grove couple already have an 11-year-old daughter. The family immigrated to Orange County from Tepic, Mexico, four years ago. Leo Lomeli, 32, is a carpenter’s assistant; Maura Lomeli, a homemaker.

The couple have some financial concerns about raising the children but said that friends and relatives promised to help out with supplies and household chores. Maura’s mother, Maria Lopez, 60, who is visiting from Mexico, will stay in Garden Grove as long as she is needed.

Information: (714) 966-8174.