Parents of Sextuplets Face Press After Record-Setting Pregnancy

The doctors who told Beverly and Rocco Boniello they were expecting six children seemed more concerned about the father than the mother.

“They were waiting for him to fall down,” Beverly Boniello joked Saturday. “He was the one they were worried about most, I think.”

The new parents spoke to reporters Saturday for the first time since the March 24 birth of Trifon Robert, Olivia Fredericka, Sabrina Juliet, Gerard Martin, Sophia Betty and Stella Raquel.

At the couple’s request, Stony Brook’s University Hospital had kept the multiple birth quiet until word leaked out last week.

“We wanted to have time to make sure that our children were coming along medically and doing well, and give us time to adjust to having six kids,” Beverly Boniello explained.

She continued working as a Postal Service mail carrier through the early weeks of her pregnancy but spent the past month in the hospital. She hasn’t yet decided whether to return to her job.

In carrying the two boys and four girls for 29 weeks and a day, the 27-year-old mother set a U.S. record for the longest sextuplet pregnancy, doctors said.

She had been taking the fertility drug Metrodin, and doctors told the couple that they had six babies on the way about eight weeks into the pregnancy.

Rocco Boniello, 30, said his first thought was: “How am I going to pay for this?”

“It was overwhelming at first,” said the NYNEX technician. “We’re not wealthy, so we’ll just do what all parents do when they have a child: They make do.”

The babies, born within four minutes of each other, were all in good condition in separate incubators.