Multiple Personalities : Quads Celebrate 1st Year With Lots of Help From Family and Friends

It took a team of 18 doctors, nurses and pediatric specialists to bring the Kelly quads into the world.

Celebrating their first birthday Monday was no less daunting a task.

Eighty people, including grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, close friends and neighbors, gathered at the home of Tricia and Ryan Kelly to wish a happy birthday to their children--Brendan, Morgan, Jackson and Aidan--the first reported set of quadruplets born in Ventura County.

“It takes quite a crew of people to raise these kids,” said their great-aunt, Betty Douglass of Santa Maria.

The quads were born Sept. 1, 1996, at Columbia Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks.

Tricia and Ryan, both 36, had tried unsuccessfully for five years to get pregnant, and finally turned to in vitro fertilization.

Success was theirs on the first try.

Thirty-five weeks later, three boys, Aidan, Jackson and Brendan, and a girl, Morgan, were born, and Tricia and Ryan have cherished every moment with them since.

“I haven’t regretted a thing,” said Ryan, a music teacher at Viewpoint School in Calabasas. “Knowing them now, and getting to know them over the past year, I just can’t imagine life without them.”

The couple’s struggle with infertility included discussions about options, including adoption.

But Ryan said he is the one who voted against bringing home someone else’s baby.

“It’s built into a man that you want a child of your own,” he said.

That they were given four children is an even greater blessing for the couple, both committed Christians.

“The work of raising quadruplets cannot diminish the joy of having quadruplets,” Ryan said.

“The most difficult thing is trying to spread the time around, trying to spread the affection around,” he said.

As each day passes, the quads’ personalities become more pronounced, said their grandmother, Marian Barry of Fallbrook, Calif. Jordan is the happy and expressive one; Morgan is “girlie-girlie”; Aidan, the biggest of the four, is serious and happy; and Jackson’s nickname--”Smiling Jackson”--says it all.

Ryan said that watching their children grow over the past 12 months has brought him and Tricia closer together.

But he said they could not have done it without help.

“Just the novelty of quads makes baby-sitting free. There are lots of kids from school who want to do it,” he said, adding that fellow church members also help out. “We’re hoping to work that angle for a while longer.”

The children have been a tremendous financial strain, Ryan said.

For example, in the months after their birth, the quads were going through $900 worth of baby formula a month.

Now, the manufacturer provides the product free of charge, Ryan said.

And the Price Club in Oxnard has provided the couple with $100 in gift certificates every month, he said.

“It really has been teamwork all the way,” Ryan said.

Tricia said the lesson she has learned in her first year of being a mother to multiples is the importance of a schedule.

“You do that so they have a routine, and that way they know what to expect and I know what to expect. And it helps to pray a lot,” she said.

Most fulfilling, said Tricia, is the children’s reaction to their parents.

“When you walk into the room and all four of them smile at you because they realize who you are, there is just nothing that compares to that,” she said.

Tricia and Ryan will celebrate their 11th wedding anniversary Sept. 13, and while they are looking forward to a few special moments away from the children, neither can wait to get home.

“There are days when we’d like to just run out to dinner, but we can’t because of the children,” she said.

“But nothing compares to the joy they have brought us.”