By Jenny Masche

February 2003: I was introduced to Bryan through a very good friend. Bryan was best friends with Mike Fields — a guy I grew up with my whole life — in the Air Force. I received an e-mail one day from Bryan while he was stationed in Kuwait, and the rest is history! We talked for hours upon hours, both on the phone and via e-mail, and then spent seven months flying back and forth from Texas to Arizona until we were married on January 2, 2004.

Bryan and I both wanted a large family, and we even joked about having a baseball team since that was our favorite sport. After two-and-a-half years of trying to get pregnant, including two miscarriages, our ob/gyn referred us to an infertility specialist in Las Vegas to find out why I was miscarrying and why it was taking us so long to get pregnant. Fortunately, she found no major reason but recommended we do in-vitro fertilization so they could look at the embryos and make sure they were viable. That seemed like the final step in the infertility treatment process and we just weren’t ready for that. So in November 2006 we decided to do intrauterine insemination (IUI), a very simple, noninvasive procedure that still allowed nature to take its course. There was no implantation; the embryos were created by themselves in the womb.

December 4, 2006: We discovered I was pregnant…and we were very excited! As we drove to Las Vegas for our first ultrasound on December 29, I was so incredibly nervous that I wasn’t going to see a heartbeat. I kept praying and praying, “God, please let me see a heartbeat.” I just wasn’t emotionally prepared for another miscarriage. However, it was not even a thought in our wildest dreams that we would see more than one heartbeat, much less six! We were hysterical and shocked by the news. We were strongly encouraged to do selective reduction, which made me cry all the more! Bryan and I immediately said in unison, “We could never do that!” We were both incredibly depressed and overwhelmed with the news until January 11, the day we met Dr. Elliott. Dr. Elliott was the perinatologist we chose in Phoenix, Arizona. He was very honest about the risks involved in carrying sextuplets, both to the mother and to the babies, but at the same time he was very encouraging and he basically said “If you believe you can do this, you will have a good outcome.” From that point forward we put everything in God”s hands and said “Your will be done.”

June 11, 2007: Savannah Jane, Bailey Elizabeth, Grant William, Cole Robert, Molli Grace, and Blake Nickolas were born. It was the most surreal day of our lives. To watch six little babies be delivered and they are all yours–it is indescribable. For months to follow we both took turns with bouts of extreme depression, but the Lord has been incredibly faithful to deliver us from that and He continues to give us a new supply of Joy on a daily basis. Of course, there are many challenges in raising six kids who are all the same age, but the blessings definitely outweigh the challenges. I think the hardest thing for Bryan and I so far in raising sextuplets is our inability to take them with us to normal places we want to go. My friends with singletons can go about any day normally and go to the bank, the grocery store, shopping, etc. It is impossible for us to do any of these tasks with six children. So either one of us has to be home so the other person can go, or if Bryan is at work I have to find someone to sit with the kids while they’re napping so I can run errands really fast. Luckily, we have tremendous family support. We will both be looking forward to the day when they are old enough for us to take them anywhere and everywhere and not have to leave them at home. Bryan may disagree on that! We do try to take at least one if not two everywhere we go so they can have normal daily experiences in public. The great joy of raising sextuplets is definitely the six smiling faces calling out “mama, dada,” the twelve little feet running toward you and the twelve little arms around your neck hugging you! Six little mouths to kiss and six little ones to cuddle… the amount of love we experience for the six of them is sometimes incomprehensible, and we feel our hearts may burst!

Filming Raising Sextuplets honestly has been a blast for all of us! Our film crew is small and has become like family, and we are truly blessed by them! They are only filming us about six days a month, so it is actually a very small amount of time and never feels overwhelming or stressful. We feel very fortunate that we are able to capture certain events and moments of our family on tape. Whatever the Lord wants to make of this show it is up to Him. We just pray that in the process, some people may be blessed and encouraged by the trials we face on a daily basis and will see how the Lord helps us overcome.