Like many couples, Sarah and Andy Justice of Tulsa, Oklahoma, had trouble getting pregnant. After trying to conceive for several years, they decided to consult a fertility specialist.
Though the infertility specialist told them that in vitro fertilization was a possibility, Sarah and Andy were discouraged by the procedure’s very high cost and low success rate. They were told that there was only a one in ten chance with in vitro fertilization that the pregnancy would take.
So the Justices decided to try adoption. The road to adoption was long and full of disappointments. Twice, Sarah and Andy found themselves close to signing papers when the birth mother changed her mind. They started to doubt that they would ever be parents, but they tried not to lose hope.
A Bigger Adoption Than Anticipated
Then they were paired with yet another expectant mother who had chosen them to adopt her baby. They even got the chance to go to an ultrasound appointment with her. As the technician moved the ultrasound wand around, it was quiet in the room—but it wouldn’t be quiet for long. Everybody there was in for a surprise: there wasn’t just one baby in there but three!
The Justices were shocked and overwhelmed. In all their years of imagining brining home a baby, they had never imagined bringing home three babies at once. At this point in a potential adoption case, the adopting couple can choose to break the contract. But just as if Sarah had been pregnant with the triplets herself, the Justices decided to move forward and prepare themselves to be immediate parents of three.
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Three car seats, three swings, a triple stroller: the Justices needed triple of everything!
And they didn’t have as much time to prepare as they expected. The triplets were born two months early. Hannah, Joel and Elizabeth had to stay in the NICU at first, so Sarah and Andy commuted between hospital and home, keeping attentive watch over their newborns while getting their hoe ready to receive them.
Little did they know, something else was happening at the same time. Another surprise was in the works.
Fate Strikes When You Least Expect It
One week after the triplets’ birth, Sarah started to feel strange. It was tiring going back and forth to the hospital and getting everything ready, but Sarah knew something else was going on, too. She wanted to make sure she was 100% healthy before the triplets came home, so she made an appointment to see her doctor. She couldn’t believe her ears when the doctor told her the news: Sarah was pregnant!
But there was more. Sarah wasn’t pregnant with one baby—she was pregnant with two!
“I was shocked and a bit overwhelmed,” Sarah said, “because I got to thinking, added it up, and I’m like, wow, if they go to term we’re about five babies in eight months.”
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But that shock and overwhelm was soon replaced with gratitude and excitement. A house full of children was something the Justices had been “dreaming of and longing for for years.” They just didn’t expect their dream to happen all at once.
Once the twins, Abigail and Andrew, joined the family, the Justices found their once quiet home filled with the cries and giggles of five children all under the age of one. It was far more than a full-time job to keep the babies clean, warm and fed. At one point, the Justices said they were going through 84 bottles and over 300 diapers in a week. They were lucky to have the help of family and friends.
Parenthood Is a Blessing
And then came Caleb. While the busyness of raising twins and triplets never goes away, yet one more surprise was awaiting the Justices that would add to the joyful chaos. Sarah was pregnant again, and this time, she would give birth to just one baby boy.
“My husband says all we do is babies, everything else in life has pretty much stopped,” Sarah admitted. “But it was something we’ve wanted so badly that we love it. It’s not to say it’s not a lot of work and we’re not tired a lot but it’s great. We just really love having these children.”
During those long years of struggling with infertility, it never crossed Sarah and Andy’s minds that they would be the parents of not one but two sets of multiples. Another precious boy would also enter their family, and the Justice family now counts three daughters and three sons.
From losing hope that they would ever have children to having a nearly instant family of eight, the Justices consider their road to parenthood a true blessing.
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