Mass siblings

In a span of four years, the family of Mercedes Sandhu of Texas, United States suddenly grew to eight members after she recently gave birth again.

Mercedes and her husband, Jonathan, brought their quadruplets home in July from the Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH). Born prematurely at 29 weeks and three days on 1 May, babies Hannah Grace, Lucy Marie, Rebecca Claire and Petra Anne had to spend over three months in the neonatal intensive care unit of TCH before being discharged.

Together with sons Luke, 4, and Aaron, 2, the Sandhus now have six children to take care of. As challenging as feeding and changing diapers are is telling the quadruplets apart. One way was to label their bassinets with their names and lining them up in birth order — Hannah, Lucy, Rebecca, Petra — for their feedings, ABC News reports.

As for the parents, they have to contend with sleep deprivation multiplied by four.

“My wife and I take shifts at night and one person feeding and changing multiple babies can take two hours. Then you have to repeat it all a few hours later,” Jonathan told ABC News’ “Good Morning America” segment.

Meanwhile, Russian billionaire businessman Pavel Durov is spared such a parental burden despite having many children.

The 39-year-old founder and owner of the messaging platform Telegram, which is used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, has reportedly fathered 100 children, but not naturally.

Durov is a sperm donor as he wanted childless couples to have children. His sperm so far has helped over 100 couples across 12 countries to have children and one in vitro fertilization clinic still offers his anonymous frozen sperm, USA Today reports.

While fathers like Durov are immune from the stress of parenting, children conceived with sperm from anonymous donors face the reality of having many unknown siblings.

One, Jaclyn Frosolone, found out that she has at least 200 siblings following a 23andMe DNA test.

The test kit provides probabilities of the user’s ancestral origins by showing percentages of his or her DNA from different regions of the world and tracks direct maternal and paternal lines to provide information about where their ancestors came from, according to Google.

According to a report on USA Today, “Donor-conceived people with many siblings often live in fear of accidentally having children with one of their half-siblings, or even having children with their own father if they were to pursue donor insemination.”