Hospital Helps Quintuplets Celebrate Their First Birthday

Just a year ago, about the only way to tell one Shier quintuplet from the next was a color-coding scheme worked out by the pediatric staff of Long Beach Memorial Medical Center.

By now, though, their temperaments give them away. Ther mother, Patty Shier, 35, says Sarah is patient, Joshua is feisty, Jonathan is lighthearted, while Rachel is analytical.

And when one of them bursts into tears, it’s a good chance that it will be Hannah, her mother says.

But on Wednesday, at the quintuplets’ first birthday party, the nursing staff that helped deliver them couldn’t resist.

Before each of five color-coded highchairs was placed a yellow, blue, green, white or pink birthday cake.

Photogenic they were. Just 10 feet away, dozens of reporters and photographers were eating it up, recording every yawn, tear and giggle of what may well be one of the country’s healthiest sets of quintuplets.

“They’re doing great,” said Dr. Rifaat Salem, the Redondo Beach-based fertility doctor who oversaw the surprisingly successful in-vitro fertilization process for Patty Shier and her husband, Scot.

Indeed, doctors at Memorial’s Miller Children’s Hospital took turns delivering upbeat diagnoses.

“They’re normal 1-year-olds and they’re hardly ever sick,” said Dr. Craig Towers, the couple’s pediatrician.

When their mother took the podium, however, the discourse turned from medicine to sleeping schedules. She laid out the children’s daily routine, one she says she learned from a church parenting program: awake no earlier than 8 a.m. and to bed by 8 p.m., with no less than two two-hour naps in between.

“That makes the day go a lot easier, let me tell you,” Patty Shier said.

Then she added some hope for other mothers with less restful newborns: “If we did it with five, other people can do it with one.”

As might be expected, the quintuplets dug happily into their birthday cakes.

And by the end of the party, there was no difficulty telling them apart: each was color-coded with cake frosting.