RICHARDSON

WORDS : REBECCA MEIDINGER

PHOTOGRAPHY

The ultrasound gel warm on her already bulging belly and her nerves a jumble of excited anticipation, Sally Richardson gasped when she saw two babies cuddling side by side on the screen. After many grueling weeks and months of fertility treatments and negative pregnancy tests, she ecstatically stared at the miracles growing inside her. “Two babies! We can do that!” Erich her husband, who takes all things in stride, nodded calmly. As the technician moved the tool around her belly, the screen changed, and the two babies seemed to change position. “So that must be the babies at a different angle?”

“Well, um, no,” responded the technician, hesitating. “Those are actually different babies.”

“You mean, like four babies? Ha. Nice joke.”

“No, I’m not joking. Yes, four babies. You’re having quads.”

Stunned silence filled the room. Erich stared at the ground, unable to say a word. “I didn’t say a word until at least the next day. I was just in shock. I couldn’t talk.” But Sally, the extrovert of the marriage, was bursting to talk. After telling the poor technician, Bob, to “Shut up!” she then turned her attention to the nurses and kept saying, “We got this. We got this. We got this,” while Erich continued to stare silently at the floor. “Thankfully I went back to work right after the appointment and was able to talk to my teaching team. I walked right in and held up four fingers. ‘Four? What? What are you talking about?’ ‘Babies! I’m having four babies!’”

When they first met as rival West Fargo swim coaches, Erich with the Sheyenne Mustangs and Sally the WFHS Packers, they never could have imagined that, together, they would one day dive into the wild, unchartered waters of parenting quads. Sally, being an eighth grade science teacher for West Fargo Public Schools, and Erich, directing the YMCA’s Gators swim program and head-coaching Sheyenne High School’s swim teams, are both highly invested in the youth of our community. Sharing a love for kids, their dating conversations revolved around their desires for children even before they broached the topic of marriage. As wedding bells rang, they jumped in head first but then struggled to achieve pregnancy for their entire first year of marriage. Sally’s obsession with learning everything there was to know about fertility cycles intensified with every devastating pregnancy test. Shortly after their first anniversary they embarked on a long and emo-