Mother’s Day will be five-times a blessing for New York-area mom Arlette Rivera — whose precious quintuplets came home last month after five weeks in the hospital.
The new mom, and her husband, Christopher, both first-time parents, will spend the day with their three boys and two girls.
All were born healthy and between 2 and 3 pounds on Feb. 26 at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Manhattan.
“Words will never be enough to show the level of gratitude we feel,” the new parents said of babies Sebastian, Sophia, Mathias, Montserrat and Thiago.
Quintuplets remain rare nationwide, with fewer than 50 cases recorded in the US in 2017, according to the latest federal stats.
And New York-Presbyterian hadn’t delivered a set of quints since 1992.
But they were ready for Rivera, having assembled well in advance a team of physicians, nurses, anesthesiologists, fellows and nurse technicians for the delivery.
Arlette’s cesarean section came at 30 weeks and two days.
“We couldn’t be happier for them,” said Dr. Chia-Ling Nhan-Chang, who led the team and served as Rivera’s obstetrician.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the delivery room.”
Rivera managed to avoid most of the complications associated with multiples, Nhan-Chang told The Post on Friday.
Still, the preemies’ first home needed to be the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, or “NICU,” where they could be closely monitored.
But how to keep so many babies from being confused with each other by all their caregivers, given their shared last name?
To avoid mixups, the hospital tested an innovative “pictograph” system.
Each of the quints was assigned a different, simple-to-remember image chosen by Rivera — and based on their personalities in the womb.
Sebastian, born at 2 pounds and tiniest of the five, was a baseball. Sophia, at 2 pounds, 6 ounces, was a bumblebee.
Mathias, at 2 pounds, 8 ounces, was a rocket ship. Montserrat, at 2 pounds, 8 ounces, was a sunflower. And Thiago — at 3 pounds, the largest — was a violin.
The pictographs were displayed alongside their given names on both their medical records and their individual isolettes — and proved so much better identifiers than the old- fashioned “Baby A, B, C, D and E” method of years past, hospital officials said.
Additional reporting by Laura Italiano
