Septuplets Sleep Quietly as a Parade of Gifts Rolls In

Slumbering peacefully in seven incubators, the McCaughey septuplets passed their first day outside the womb Thursday in surprisingly good health, unaware as a nation showered their suburban Des Moines family with money, flowers, quilts and a monster van big enough to ferry a Scout troop.

While doctors and nurses at Blank Children’s Hospital monitored the infants around the clock, keeping tabs on their weakened breathing functions on a day considered the most critical to their survival, companies and donors rushed forward to provide Bobbi and Kenny McCaughey with a staggering array of amenities to help them care for their brood.

Kenny McCaughey, 27, a Chevrolet billing clerk who was at his 29-year-old wife’s side during her caesarean section on Wednesday, seemed pleasantly stunned when he emerged from the Des Moines hospital to accept some of the donations.

“Wow!” the father said as corporate officials paraded before him with offers of the van, bank donations and a year’s supply of groceries. “This is one of the most blessed events I’ve ever encountered.”

Admitting he was still too nervous to pick up his infants, McCaughey said he knew his children are now “a piece of history”--the first septuplets born alive in the United States. But, surrounded by cameras and microphones, he said his “big fear is that this doesn’t turn into a big show. This is my family. . . . And we’re not on for display.”

Friends in the family’s hometown of Carlisle, Iowa, had kept the septuplets’ impending birth a secret until Bobbi McCaughey’s 28th week of pregnancy. For months, the McCaugheys, a religious couple who rejected the idea of aborting any of the infants even if they showed signs of birth defects, have been aided by fellow churchgoers.

Members of the Missionary Baptist Church baby-sat for their 21-month-old daughter, Mikayla, and arranged housekeeping and meals. Now they are collecting donations for the family and preparing the couple’s tiny two-bedroom white clapboard home for an invasion when the infants begin returning home, likely sometime in January.

But there is still uncertainty about where home will be.

The McCaugheys have been promised a house--arranged by Iowa Gov. Terry E. Branstad and provided by an Iowa developer--and just about everything they will need inside. Lumber companies called to donate wood. A heating company offered a furnace. An insurance company promised seven car seats. Gerber Products Co. said it would stock the pantry with a year’s supply of baby food.

And, luckily for the good people of Carlisle, a year’s supply of Pampers was on the way.

“We were just starting to talk about how we might deal with all those diapers when Procter & Gamble stepped in,” said LaVena Owens, a family friend. “That could have got messy.”

Transportation was waiting outside the hospital Thursday in the form of a huge new Chevrolet Express Van that seats 15 passengers. The excited father drove unsteadily for 100 feet before he gave up. “He’ll get plenty of time to practice,” said David Wright, who owns the dealership where McCaughey works.

Despite the estimated $400,000 to $650,000 in medical costs the family is expected to incur at the hospital, Blank Children’s officials have said they would give the family ample time and leeway in dealing with debts. Friends said Thursday that Kenny McCaughey’s company health insurance would likely take care of all but $4,000 of the costs.

Along with the corporate largess came private gifts--the smaller but equally gracious demonstrations of kindness sent by Americans love-struck by the septuplets. Bouquet orders phoned in from New York to Cedar Rapids came in all morning at Owens’ flower shop.

Quilts were being made as close as neighboring Palmyra, where several ladies were busy readying seven blankets, and as distant as the Internet, where those taking part in a Web quilting bee were racing to prepare their own warm embrace.

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The infants, in fact, were as warm as they needed to be, their temperatures monitored and stabilized electronically and double-checked by a staff of nurses and neonatal specialists. Doctors said Thursday that while all the infants encountered immediate breathing difficulties after their births, they appeared in good health.

Like many premature, low-weight infants, the septuplets were weakened by “respiratory distress syndrome,” their lungs unable to fully absorb oxygen without aid from respirators.

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Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.