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THREE PAIRS OF TWINS FILL CAROLINE COUNTY HOME

April 10, 2005 1:09 am

When Marla Davis talks about her unusual family, she likes to mention how blessed she is.

Her children started sleeping through the night early on, and they've always done well on road trips. They're not picky eaters, for the most part.

"All my babies have been good," said the Caroline County mom. "I guess that's been my blessing for having so many at once."

As good fortune goes in the baby department, the 32-year-old mother has been doubly blessed, again and again.

She and her husband, Chris, have three sets of twins.

Read that again if you need to. It's not a misprint.

The Davises have five girls and one boy, all fraternal, all age 6 and under, all living in a three-bedroom house in Lake Land'Or.

Twins don't run on either side of the family, and none of the factors said to increase the odds of having multiples apply.

Marla isn't over 45, hasn't taken fertility drugs and doesn't live in Massachusetts or Connecticut, states that lead the nation in the rate of twin births.

She's merely--you guessed it--blessed with a body that produces more eggs than average.

"I apparently was made to have litters," she said, smiling.

A sense of humor comes in handy when you're changing 24 diapers a day, as the Davises were doing after the second set came along.

That was in August 2000, and Marla thought she was going to die.

Not really, but she was expecting a disaster.

She'd been so happy with her first pregnancy, when an ultrasound showed two beating hearts.

Chris picked her up and twirled her around. The couple was even more excited than when they first found out they would be parents.

Marla didn't have any problems with the pregnancy. Babies Lilly and Stephan were born in July 1998, and weighed more than 12 pounds, combined.

Marla managed to nurse them for almost a year. Chris got a better-paying job, with a company that cleans up hazardous waste such as oil spills.

When Marla got pregnant a second time, Chris started joking that an ultrasound would show the same results as before.

She didn't think it was funny. There's no way, she told herself. That would be like lightning striking twice.

Well, here's a jolt about bolts.

They do smite the same person, place or thing more than once. Likewise, the odds of having more twins increases after the first set comes along.

"Once your body has conceived twins and sustained a twin pregnancy, the body kind of accepts that as normal," said Pamela Fierro, a Virginia Beach mother and author of "Guide to Parenting Multiples."

A producer who's doing a segment on the Davises for the Discovery Health cable channel put it this way.

In sheer numbers, the odds of three pregnancies resulting in three sets of twins "might be one in a million," said Courtney Everett-Enlow, who works for Advanced Medical Productions in Chapel Hill, N.C.

But because Marla's body produces more of the hormone that causes eggs to develop, it's not that unusual that she had six babies in three pregnancies.

If she got pregnant again, she'd have a pretty good chance of ending up with four pairs, said the producer. She's researched statistics and worked for months on the story, called "House of Twins." It will air on June 13.

"While statistically it appears really, really rare, hormonally, it's not," Everett-Enlow said.

Marla's body may have accepted twins as the norm, but her mind hadn't. She was devastated to learn she was pregnant with twins a second time.

All she could think was there'd be no way she could handle two newborns and two 2-year-olds.

Her mother stayed with her for a week after Erica and Audrey arrived in August 2000.

Once again, Marla had a normal pregnancy, with each infant weighing almost 7 pounds.

This time, she wasn't able to breast-feed the newborns, and that upset her. But when the babies started sleeping through the night at six weeks, "it was a blessing," Marla said.

The Davises managed.

"It took me months to figure out it wasn't going to be a catastrophe," she said. "I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall."

When it never did, Marla began to think that double doubles might be doable.

The experience strengthened her faith. She and her husband are Mormons and attend the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Hanover County. She'd always thought that God would meet her needs and came to see that included taking care of as many little ones as she brought home from the hospital.

"People always say they could never do it, but you'd be surprised at what you can do when you have to do it," she said.

After two sets of twins, the Davises realized they had a pretty good chance of repeating history.

They waited until Lilly and Stephan started elementary school, and Erica and Audrey were in preschool to try again.

They weren't at all surprised when their third ultrasound showed a pair of hearts.

Julia and Lacey were the biggest babies yet, weighing a combined 141/2 pounds. They were born in September 2004.

Marla loved being pregnant and sometimes feels cheated that she didn't get to do it six times. She had her tubes tied last fall, but she and Chris may reverse the surgery--one day--if they decide they want more.

There certainly seemed to be plenty of little blessings running around the Davis household on a recent afternoon.

Marla was struggling to get dinner on the table and to do all those end-of-the-day chores, but she clearly was outnumbered by little people.

She asked Lilly, the oldest, to entertain one infant or the other while she boiled spaghetti and made a dent in the dishes.

The mother also tried to get Stephan to sit down and do his homework while Erica and Audrey quibbled over a game of fish.

As afternoon slipped into evening--and Chris called to say he had to work late--the children did what tired and cranky kids are famous for.

The only thing that made their grumbling different from any other child's was that it came from pairs who were about the same size.

Stephan whined because he didn't want to read the sentences about people taking naps or carrying ladders. Erica whined because she couldn't find a box that held Barbie-doll shoes.

Lilly complained because she wanted to play with her friends outside, not baby-sit. Audrey complained because she wanted cake, not spaghetti.

Audrey started to whimper when her mother said there'd be no dessert until she ate dinner.

The girl cried more when Stephan grabbed a few noodles out of the bowl and slurped them down in front of her.

She sobbed harder when Erica, her twin sister, almost licked her lips as she dug into her dessert, saying, "Now, this is good cake."

But her weeping really turned to wailing when she tried to barter over bites.

Mom said four forks of spaghetti and one meatball. Audrey held up three fingers and blubbered she could only eat "this many."

Mom had stayed calm while she pleaded with Stephan over the reading and had convinced Lilly she was a natural caregiver. But she was losing her cool in the showdown over dinner.

"You can have some cake after you eat some dinner, but you're not having cake until you eat dinner, and that's the way it's going to be," she said.

Audrey ended up in her room--with Stephan in her face. First, he jumped around in front of her, teasing about how strong he was.

When his mother told him to stay out of her room, he stood at the doorway and stuck in his arm--until Audrey saw the limb and squealed.

When told again to leave his sister alone, Stephan walked down the hallway, away from her. Then he got on the floor and crawled toward her until Audrey heard him coming and started to scream again.

She eventually came back to the table and ate her spaghetti and meatballs--and that piece of cake.

The evening's events left the mom a little exhausted, as well as perplexed.

She wondered if Audrey was coming down with something. She's more even-tempered than that, and the best sport in the bunch. There is a child who has a crisis a minute, it seems, but it's not Audrey.

Colds, strep throat and stomach bugs had made their rounds through the family over the winter, but maybe something else was in the air.

Marla also wondered why her only son seemed to enjoy torturing his sisters. Is it a boy thing?

And, why do children turn into "little monkeys" when they're tired and fighting fatigue?

And what's more, why couldn't Chris be on time, on this particular night? She knew why he had to stay late, but that didn't help a body that was already tired from staying up with babies.

Marla was glad to see the father of six arrive, a little after 7 p.m. Chris got a quick shower, then took over at the table.

Of course, by now, the "monkeys" seemed rather calm and were drawing pictures of angels in pencil. They routinely gave one to their mother or father and told them how much they loved them.

Sometimes, blessings are mixed like that.

To reach CATHY DYSON: 540/374-5425 cdyson@freelancestar.com