A couple from Grand Rapids, Michigan – Julie and John Vandermolen – had been trying, unsuccessfully, to start a family together. They’d been trying to get pregnant for several years now, and Julie had only just had a miscarriage earlier that year.
It didn’t seem that fortune was on their side.
When Julie suddenly began exhibiting the first signs of pregnancy, the couple knew that they wanted to go into the doctor as soon as possible for an ultrasound, just to check and double check on the health of their child.
During that first ultrasound, just six weeks after Julie realized she was pregnant, “Things got real very quickly,” John recalled.
“The ultrasound tech…[brought] John a trash can just in case,” Julie recalled.
That was moment before the doctor announced to the Vandermolens that they would not just be having a child – but three identical triplets. A birth like this only happens once in every 20 or 30 million births, given that in order for this to happen, the fertilized egg has to divide once, and then one of these eggs has to divide yet again.
“I just was not prepared. I felt like I had been hit by a car,” John confessed when he heard the news.
Thankfully, the remainder of Julie’s pregnancy proceeded far more smoothly than the announcement of their children – though Julie did unexpectedly go into labor after only 32 weeks of pregnancy.
That day, on November 26, the couple rushed to the hospital.
One of their sons began to breathe on his own after being born, but the other two had to receive support before they were able to join their brother. The entire Vandermolen family remained in the hospital for the month following, until doctors deemed all three boys – Ivan, William, and Harrison – fit to return home.
Now, about a month after the birth of their sons, the Vandermolens are reuniting at home. The triplets are “three very different sizes right now … so we can tell them apart really easily,” John said, relieved. But he and Julie do plan on devising a plan to tell them apart as they grow older.
You can watch the couple’s pregnancy announcement here. It went viral earlier this year:
