Above, Tanner Crissman gets acquainted with his first birthday cake. Below the story, Wyatt and father Kevin show a resemblance.

The Crissman quads: A year older, a lot bigger

David Gulliver - posted 11:45 pm Sunday, July 19

When the world met the Crissman quadruplets, together they weighed a little more than a gallon of milk.

Sarasota County's first quads in a decade stayed in the hospital for months, always two steps forward, one step back. Sophia had a collapsed lung and needed a chest tube, Wyatt so frail that only the nurses -- not even his parents -- could hold him.

But Saturday, the three boys and their sister passed from lap to lap and hug to hug in the Crissmans' little North Port home, packed with family and friends celebrating the quadruplets' first birthday.

In one way, it was harder to hold them: Tanner weighs in at 22 pounds, with his siblings close behind.

Their mother, Sarah, looking as unflappable as ever and surprisingly well-rested, watched from the kitchen with her older daughter Abby, 3, nearby.

"I tell everyone, it's easier having multiples than it is having one baby, because they entertain each other all day, every day," she said.

"I just put them down and they play, and they're happy, most of the time. When they're not trying to eat each other."

Said their father, Kevin, eyeing Tanner: "There's nothing he won't eat."

For the crowd, though, all they ate was a good swath of their miniature birthday cakes, one for each, with the names inscribed in frosting.

On more normal days, they're tearing through a platoon's worth of provisions. Sarah makes her own baby food, 450 ounces every 11 days, plus 16 bottles of baby formula and other assorted foods. They spend about $200 on groceries every 10 days. She does four loads of laundry a day, and their water bill has climbed from $35 to almost $100 a month.

But they're not complaining. After losing a baby at almost 20 weeks, Sarah and Kevin were stunned when she conceived the foursome, and with no fertility medications, her doctor said.

Then the babies arrived 12 weeks early, spent months in the Sarasota Memorial Hospital neonatal intensive care unit, running a $600,000-plus bill that was covered by Sarah's insurance as a hospital employee. No longer working, the quads' healthcare is via Medicaid. All four later developed RSV, a viral infection that causes breathing problems. After all that, the parents are happy to have four healthy babies -- and that sleep through the night, no less.

Now, despite their simultaneous arrival and time together, each one is staking out an individual personality. In mom's words:

"Sophia's feisty, but she has to be -- she has three brothers. She can definitely stick up for herself. She's got quite the little attitude. I like to say she got it from Kevin, but I know where it really came from," she says, and laughs.

"Tanner is my bully. He likes to go over, instead of around, the other babies. But he's a ham. He thinks he's the funniest little boy in the whole wide world. He's standing up now, so when you come in the room in the morning, he's ready to climb out.

"Joel is my ladies' man. He loves the girls. and I love that he's got that little built-in mohawk, because he has no hair on the sides, just on the top," she said, laughing again. "He's a lover. He'd be totally happy if he was held all day, every day.

"Wyatt is just my little happy-go-lucky guy. He's happy from the minute he wakes up to the minute he goes to bed. Even when all the other babies are screaming their heads off, he's still just happy."

That may be the biggest surprise. The babies were born July 15, 2008, and Sarah was not able to hold Wyatt until the end of October. "For the longest time, we couldn't even touch him, because when we touched him, he would stop breathing, and his heart rate would drop so fast," she said.

"It's really hard to go in to the hospital and not even be able to touch your baby."

A year later, that's no longer a problem.

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To read David Gulliver's feature on the Crissmans and the quadruplets' precarious birth, go to this link.

You can see a photo slideshow of the quadruplets at the Crissmans' site, thecrissmanquads.blogspot.com.