Pregnancy can be an exciting and surprising time for moms and dads. One unexpected outcome could be news of twins - having twice the amount of kids than expected. Well for one mom in Massachusetts, she got the surprising news of twins twice... in the same pregnancy.
Her name is Ashley Ness and she overcame odds of one in ten million to give birth to two sets of identical twins at the same time. Already a mom of three kids, the 35-year-old Ashley now has four more children to add to her pack - two girls and two boys.
The babies came a little early - 12 weeks short of a full-term pregnancy - but everyone is doing well, though the children will be staying at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for another eight weeks for observation.
Dr. Ahmet Baschat, director of the Center for Fetal Therapy and a professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics said of Ashley, "If she were playing the lottery, if she's this lucky, she would be very rich," noting to People.com that her successful pregnancy is the first time he has ever heard of the phenomenon happening in his three decade long career, stating, "That variety I haven't seen. We see a lot of rare stuff, but this is the first time I'm hearing this in my entire career." It happens when two eggs are both fertilized by two different sperm, then both eggs split to become twins.
Ashley first found out she was pregnant when she visited her gynecologist to renew her birth control prescription. Two weeks later, during Ashley's first ultrasound, the stunned technician spotted four fetuses and was so surprised that she had to excuse herself from the room to Google exactly what she was seeing.
Ashley, a hair stylist, has an eight-year-old daughter from a previous marriage and two stepsons, ages ten and seven, with her boyfriend. Now that she has four more kids, she said her life is complete. As for the babies' names, she plans to continue a family tradition of using names that start with CH, so the girls will be Chelsey and Chatham and the boys Chance and Cheston.
You can follow her journey with two new sets of twins on Instagram. Meanwhile, to help her out with the many expenses sure to come with such a big family, Ashley's friends have set up a GoFundMe for her.