Couple Who Adopted and Then Got Pregnant Bring Home Triplets from NICU: 'So Blessed'
"Our family is so blessed this holiday season with OUR ENTIRE FAMILY HOME IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS," Zac and Brittney Wolfe wrote in a statement to PEOPLE
A small family in Pennsylvania has grown significantly, just in time for Christmas!
Zac and Brittney Wolfe, who struggled for years to have children, then adopted their baby daughter, Charlie, in July, welcomed triplets Knox, Navie, and Noa on Oct. 19.
“Knox, Noa and Navie decided it was time to make their GRAND appearance at 30 weeks and 5 days!,” the Wolfes said on Facebook in October. “@pennhighlandshc was more than prepared for this delivery! All doctors and staff were exceptional. Brittney and the triplets are all doing very well! We will go into more detail soon, but for now, we are going to love up on Charlie, Knox, Noa and Navie! Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for all the continued prayers."
The babies then spent almost 50 days in the NICU at the Penn Highlands DuBois hospital, the proud parents announced on YouTube Wednesday.
"Our family is so blessed this holiday season with OUR ENTIRE FAMILY HOME IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS," the Wolfes told PEOPLE in a statement. "This is truly a dream come true for the Wolfe Pack! Knox, Noa, and Navie are all doing well and growing accordingly.
"For us, we are working on a schedule so that we can get our rest as well!," the family continued. "Currently from 9pm to 9am they are consuming 13 bottles between all of them. So, as you can imagine, this is tiresome! We are very fortunate and do have a lot of help from our family! This is truly the best Christmas gift that we could ever ask for!
In a message on Facebook, the family said it's been an "incredible journey" and that they feel "so blessed."
In July 2011, Zac was involved in a car accident that resulted in a spinal cord injury, The Courier Express reported.
He and Brittney had been friends since college, but after the accident, their relationship blossomed, the couple said on their website. They got engaged in 2013 in Pittsburgh and married two years later. For almost a decade, Zac and Brittney had been trying to start a family but encountered obstacles along the way.
“After a year of trying to conceive without success, we decided to seek medical advice to determine if either of us had an issue,” Zac said, per The Courier Express. ”We were nervous, due to my injury, and were unsure if we would be able to have a child naturally. After we were both cleared and underwent many tests everything came back good.”
The couple experienced fertility issues for the next five years and spent almost $100,000 on intrauterine insemination and IVF treatments that turned out unsuccessful, Business Insider reported. So the Wolfes decided to go through the adoption route and started a website to market themselves a prospective parents.
“We have both always dreamed of having a big family and infertility made us realize that it isn’t about HOW we become parents that matters to us — it is about parenthood itself — and that steered us in the direction of adoption as our path to parenthood and we couldn’t be more excited to begin our journey,” the couple wrote.
The Wolfes later revealed on their website that in 2022, they were contacted by a neighbor who heard about a woman looking to place her baby for adoption. The woman gave birth to the child who would become Zac and Brittney’s adopted daughter, Charlie, on July 27.
However, around the time they were seeking an expectant mother, the Wolfes heard about embryo adoption. According to the National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC) — which the couple went to — embryo adoption is a process in which frozen embryos that were left over by couples who went through IVF can be donated to another couple unable to conceive.
The Wolfes' first attempt at pregnancy during an embryo transfer turned out unsuccessful, per Insider. Then, in April of this year, the couple tried again. This time, the embryos were successfully implanted, and an ultrasound technician told Zac and Brittney that they were expecting triplets.
The triplets were delivered by C-section on Oct. 19. "When you're going through this, you're so stressed out," Zac earlier told Good Morning America. "And when Charlie came to us, I think that we weren't stressed as much, and Brittney's pregnancy went so good because we weren't focused on the negative. We got Charlie. We were so happy, and Brittney's pregnancy went amazing."
While Zac and Brittney described the babies' time in the NICU as exhausting due to the back-and-forth travel between the hospital and their home, they praised the doctors and nurses who cared for them.
“Everyone loved our babies as much as we did,” Brittney said in the video. “It made it a little bit easier.”