Chandler quintuplets ready to fly solo

For 19 years, the Chandler quintuplets have filled the family home with life and bustle. But now they’re ready to spread their wings and fly off to college, leaving their mom, Jeri Chandler, with the mother of all empty nests — and their father with the mother of all college bills.

“I didn’t actually think about that,” Peter Chandler, the proud father of five freshly-minted high school graduates, told TODAY’s Ann Curry Friday when the subject of “How do you pay for it?” came up. “We’ve been blessed to get to this point, and our faith will carry us through. It’ll work out. Somehow it will work out.”

The quints — Josh, Meagan, Amanda, Emily and Heidi — laughed at their dad, more excited about the prospect of starting lives on their own than concerned about the loans that they’ll have to pay off some day. After graduating from high school last week, they’re splitting up for the first time in their lives, five kids in five different colleges in five different states.

They admitted that it’s going to be strange to be known as individuals instead of as part of the Chandler brood.

Flying the coop
“This is like a great opportunity to like fly the coop — find some adventure, go off on your own,” said Meagan, who’s going to the University of New England to study nursing and play soccer, a sport all five quints play at a high level.

“It’s also helpful for us,” added Emily, who will be off to Norwich University in Vermont to study criminal justice. “We can’t stay together the whole time. We’ve gotta become independent. Right now, it’s kind of a big transition from dependency, all five of us growing up together, but now we’re starting to become independent.”

Amanda, an all-state soccer star, is off to Concordia University in Nebraska to study either athletic training and exercise science or sports management.  Josh will study secondary education and history on an R.O.T.C. scholarship at Ripon College in Wisconsin, where he also plans to try to make the track team as a non-scholarship “walk-on.”  Of the five, only Heidi, who plans to study Spanish and criminology at Regis University in Denver, will be staying close to home.

Zach, the quints’ older brother, is 23, and just graduated from Ithaca College in New York.  He is now in graduate school for an advanced degree in physical therapy. For those counting at home, that’s six kids in college.

"I’m not sure how many families have six going to college at the same time," Jeri Chandler said.  The proud mother said that the quints are getting scholarships and grants, but "there’s still a chunk that we’re responsible for, but we’ll figure it out. I0’m not sure how."

One or two kids would be nice
That’s pretty much how they’ve approached the previous 19 years, figuring it out as they go along. When the quints were conceived by in-vitro fertilization, there were no ownership manuals on families that large.

“I came from a family of eight, but it wasn’t something that I had planned for a big family,” Peter Chandler told Curry. “I thought one or two kids would be a nice kind of family. But when the doctors told us there were five, we thought, ‘Okay, here we go,’ and just did what we had to do, and we got through it and I think we’ve been blessed with healthy kids. Now they’re 19 and off to college.”

The Chandler quints were just the second set conceived through in-vitro fertilization. The Chandlers had one child, Zachary, natrually, but encountered fertility problems when they tried for a second. They were accepted for the relatively new in-vitro process, and six embryos were implanted in Jeri Chandler’s womb. Five of them proved viable, and they arrived in the world within two minutes of each other on May 20, 1989, via Caesarean section.

The first quintuplets to survive infancy were the Dionne quintuplets, born in Ontario, Canada, in 1934. They became international celebrities and a major tourist attraction — and source of income for their parents, who reportedly made a million dollars in the middle of the Great Depression by charging tourists to view the children.

The first quints to survive in the United States were born in 1963, and the first in-vitro quints were born in 1988, a year before the Chandlers. The latest figures available, from 2003, show 85 births of five or more babies surviving in the United States out of more than 136,000 total births that year. It is estimated that 99 percent of quintuplets today are the result of in-vitro fertilization; the odds of conceiving quintuplets naturally have been estimated at 1 in 65 million live births.

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