Pair Get Six-Pack Of Kids Parents Hope Children Cheaper By Half-Dozen

“We’re just going to take it one day at a time,” said Beverly Boniello, 27, a postal worker who on March 24 gave birth to sextuplets here at Health Services Center at State University Hospital.

For starters, each day will require the preparation of 72 bottles for feeding the healthy growing infants and the changing of between 70 and 80 diapers, according to Boniello’s pediatrician, Dr. Bruce Meyer, division chief of fetal-maternal medicine at the hospital.

“It’s all those diapers I fear most,” said her husband, Rocco, 30, a NYNEX technician. “I’ve already gotten used to staying up all night.”

The names have already been chosen for the two boys and four girls: Trifon Robert, Olivia Frederika, Sabrina Juliet, Gerard Martin, Sophia Betty and Stella Raquel.

Dressed in a flower-print blouse and black stretch pants, Beverly Boniello joined her husband at a news conference with their doctors Saturday morning at the hospital.

The Boniellos said that when they got married five years ago, they talked about having a family of perhaps four children - but one at a time. When their efforts at starting a family failed, Rocco Boniello said they came close to adopting an infant, then tried a fertility drug, Metrodin.

“The next thing I knew we were having six children, all at the same time,” he said. The infants were delivered by Caesarean section, all within five minutes, each weighing between 2 and 3 pounds.

Early in the pregnancy, because of the high incidence of fatalities in sextuplets, the Boniellos were offered the option of possibly reducing the number of infants to ensure the survival of those remaining. When asked why they decided to try to bring all six to gestation, Rocco Boniello said: “It was all those little heartbeats on the ultrasound.”

The Boniellos said they had been hesitant to discuss the multiple births publicly until they were certain that all the babies were healthy and would survive.

Doctors said the infants probably could go home in June.

When Rocco Boniello was asked what his first thought was when he learned that his wife was carrying sextuplets, he said, “How am I going to pay for this?”

“We’re not wealthy, so we’ll do what all parents do when they have a child,” he said. “They make do.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: DEFYING THE ODDS Experts said the babies were the third known set of sextuplets to survive in the United States and the 10th in the world.