Multi-Births and the Dilley Family

The Dilley family has the world's (or at least America's) first surviving set of sextuplets. They are all high school freshmen now. My wife first heard about them in the popular media. Diane Sawyer of CBS News has been following the family's fortunes more or less exclusively since birth. They have also written two books about their experiences, one of which serves as a major piece of source material for this article.

Becki and Keith Dilley were Indiana natives when they met at an Indiana Wendy's fast-food outlet. I don't remember much about Keith's youth, but I remember that Becki comes from a Mennonite background. The two of them were close friends, then Becki started to fall in love with Keith. She tried her best to drop discreet hints that she was interested in taking their relationship to the dating stage, but he was totally oblivious to those hints. Becki finally had to resort to taking into her confidence what she calls her "loosest-lipped, most gossip-prone friends." Although she swore them to secrecy, she knew full well that they would spill the beans to Kevin about her true feelings. In fact, that was the point of her telling them this juicy bit of gossip in the first place.

Well, they finally did get married. They tried for a full year to get pregnant, without success, trying Pergonal only as a last resort. (They could only afford a limited number of Pergonal treatments on their budget; fertility treatments are expensive and insurance companies tend not to want to cover them. They were not a wealthy couple to begin with.) There is one Christmas ornament that reminds Becki of this time period; I remember her saying that the very sight of this ornament still made her emotional whenever she would put it on the tree each year.