Quints Celebrate First Birthday Cakes, Presents, Hugs Come To Family In Fives

Everything came in fives during the first birthday party for the Bowman quintuplets.

The four girls and one boy celebrated their first birthday on Saturday.

There were five guests of honor in five high chairs. The gifts arrived in batches of five.

There were five cakes decorated with silly clowns.

There were about 55 friends and relatives of Roger and Joyce Bowman who sang a spirited version of Happy Birthday.

“It really is an incredible day,” said Joyce Bowman, who at 39 delivered by Cesarean section the only quintuplets ever born in the state.

“I can’t imagine our life any other way. We were meant to have five babies,” she added.

She turned to her husband, a quadriplegic who works as an engineer at Hanford nuclear reservation and said softly: “I’d do it all over again, but not tomorrow, honey.”

The babies were born 10 weeks before their Aug. 28 due date. They spent two months at Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center in the critical newborn department, where each struggled with a variety of ailments.

One by one they came home - Randi, Rachel, Sierra and Danielle - four sisters - followed by their brother Clint, who was the biggest of the bunch but the last to leave the Spokane hospital.

Clint still is catching up to his sisters - slowed some by asthma and respiratory problems for which he was hospitalized twice this winter. He just crawled for the first time this week.

“Clint isn’t quite holding his own with his sisters,” Joyce Bowman said. “Right now, they crawl all over him and they step on him.”

“He’s the one who has the temper of the five,” she added.

Danielle, the smallest at birth at 2 pounds, 1 ounce, remains the smallest at 17 pounds, 11 ounces.

Randi is the biggest of the quints now, weighing 21 pounds, 9-1/2 ounces, compared with her birth weight of 3 pounds, 8 ounces.