For many different couples, being able to bring a child into the world and into their own lives is the greatest and most anticipated gift. Maxine and Jake Young had always wanted a big family, but when Maxine learned she was having trouble getting pregnant, that dream turned into a nightmare. They had no idea that their lives were about to be turned upside down in a big way in just a few weeks.
Maxine and Jake Young got married in May 2016 in Pennsylvania. After the wedding, they both said they wanted to start a family as soon as possible. Maxine thought about adopting because she wanted her own children, but she also wanted to give children who didn’t have those things a loving home and family.
“Jacob was completely on board and loved the idea of having a house filled with lots of love and laughter, maybe a little bit of chaos too!”, tells Jacob’s mum, ArLette Young, in the page they she created in GoFundMe to try to get help for her son’s family.
In February 2017, just a few months after getting married, Maxine and Jake Young started training to become licensed foster parents. After completing the training and any other steps that were needed, they were given permission to start their placements in June 2017.
There were four kids who needed to be adopted.
After a month, the couple got a call telling them that there were three siblings who needed a place to live. The kids were four, two, and eleven months old. Then, after a few weeks, they went to the hospital to get their brand-new baby sister.
It wasn’t an easy job. Every child is different and has a different set of needs to meet. Jacob’s mother wrote a post on GoFundMe saying that the newlyweds had to deal with a diagnosis of autism, a lot of traumatic events, and other problems.
At the same time, Maxime and Jacob did not give up on their dream of having biological children, even though it was not easy to get there. Maxine had a lot of miscarriages and chemical pregnancies, so they had to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intrauterine insemination (IUI) to try to have a baby (IUI).
In October 2018, after all the problems they had been through, they finally got a son named Henry.
The family was done after that… or what?
After the adoption was finalized, it only took a few weeks for Maxine to notice that her body was changing on one particular day. She was going to be a mother again.
‘I didn’t even think that I could get pregnant without doing IVF or IUI, which we had to do with our son. I remember texting [my husband] and was like, “Oh my God”, Maxine said to Daily Mail.
The happy couple was shocked by how surprised they were, but they didn’t know that the biggest surprise was still to come.
“As soon as she (the doctor) started the scan I could see she had a surprised look on her face. It was very clear when you looked at the screen that there were three pregnancy sacs, all about the same size, you could also see yolk sacs and even fetal poles. She looked at me and said “welp, it looks like there are three babies growing in there!”. I started nervously laughing and was in complete shock. I asked her if everything looked normal and if the babies were measuring on track, they were, 6 weeks on the dot. I had another scan scheduled for the following week”, Maxine writes on Instagram.
They found out that they were going to have four babies.
Maxine gave birth to four healthy children on July 31. She was 32 weeks pregnant at the time. When they were born, each baby weighed between three and four pounds. They decided to give them the names Silas Ledger, Theo Alexander, Beck Killian, and Cecilia Hudson.
‘Meeting the babies was an indescribable moment. All of the struggles from the past few months were immediately forgotten, the pain and stress didn’t matter, in that moment, everything we have been through was worth it,’ wrote Maxine on Facebook.
‘Luckily, they’re all doing really well, and we’re really grateful,’ says a happy Maxine.
We hope that this strong, kind mother and her lovely family will be happy in the future. This married couple will have to deal with tough situations, but they will be able to get through them because they have the most important thing: love for each other and for their nine children.
