Pregnant Woman Learns She’s Expecting Rare Identical Triplets (Exclusive)

After being together for 10 years, Jocelyn Galvez and Nick Jahn decided they were ready to start a family.

This January, the engaged California couple were both on hand for Jocelyn’s initial appointment with her OB-GYN. During an examination to confirm that they were indeed expecting, they got some surprising news.

“We found out that there was not just one heartbeat — there were three heartbeats,” Jocelyn, 27, tells PEOPLE. “To find out we’re having multiples was very shocking.”

A month later, it was confirmed that Jocelyn and Nick, 32, were expecting identical triplet girls, a very rare occurrence, according to Dr. Ilina D. Pluym, a maternal fetal medicine physician at UCLA Health who treated Jocelyn throughout the course of her pregnancy.

“The studies are anywhere from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 1,000,0000,” Dr. Pluym says about the odds. To put that into perspective, Pluym says there’s about a 1 in 10,000 chance of having triplets in general, which is already pretty rare.

As her triplets all shared the same placenta, Jocelyn’s pregnancy was considered high-risk and her doctor warned her that there was a good chance the babies would come early and have to spend “at least several weeks” in the NICU.

“You really kind of worry about the unequal distribution of nutrients, that all three of them are fighting over the same blood supply,” Dr. Pluym says.

“They would tell us all these percentages of how this could not work and the problems that may lie ahead,” Nick recalls. “And so we didn’t really tell anybody for the first four or five months because we were being told by the doctors to just be very cautious.”

After the couple finally did tell their loved ones about the triplets they “ended up having two surprise baby showers and then two that were coordinated,” says Jocelyn.

Throughout her pregnancy, Jocelyn stayed healthy and when it came time to welcome her triplets — daughters Sienna, Rose and Lily — via cesarian section on June 25, when she was 33 weeks pregnant, everything went smoothly.

”They were all one after another, and they came out kicking and screaming,” Nick tells PEOPLE of the girls, who were born about 45 seconds apart and each weighed about 3lbs.

All in all, the delivery involved about 21 hospital staffers, including Dr. Pluym, according to Jocelyn. “Each baby had three people dedicated to each baby, had its own team. As much as it was chaos for me, it wasn’t chaos for them,” she says. “They knew exactly what they were doing. Everyone was ready and prepared.”

The triplets were immediately taken to the NICU and Jocelyn was only able to glance at them. 

“It wasn’t like a normal delivery where you got to see or kiss or touch your baby at all,” she says. “Thankfully the babies were healthy. They were just premature.”

After a couple of hours, hospital staff wheeled the new mom into the NICU so she could see her babies for 10 minutes. “They made sure that I got to meet the babies,” she says. “It was very sweet.”

Still, they weren’t actually able to hold them for a few days, Nick recalls.

Over the next several weeks, the babies were discharged separately from the hospital — Sienna after 21 days, Lily after 24 days and Rose after 30 days — and all of them are now with their parents at home. Nick acknowledges that having three babies has been an adjustment for him and Jocelyn. 

“There’s only two of us, so somebody’s got to be here to help,” Nick says, “because if they’re all three crying, it gets a little wild. You can’t feed all three of them at the same time. The challenging thing is just having enough hands and enough time to do everything — and not sleeping.”

Of course, the couple say their identical babies are already different enough that they’re able to figure out who is who pretty quickly.

“Sienna’s really tiny,” says Nick. “And then Rose is our biggest baby. Lily is the medium size. The way they cry, the way they scream, you can kind of tell by that. But if I leave from work all day and then I come home, I don’t know which baby was set in which crib — then I have to pick them up.”

The couple, who postponed their wedding after learning they were expecting triplets, have expressed gratitude to their relatives and the medical staff during their unusual journey to parenthood. “We’re just so grateful for the UCLA team because if it weren’t for them, we would not have our daughters,” Jocelyn says. “They kept their babies alive.”

“Family is everything right now,” Nick says, adding that the couple has more than “made up for the 10 years that we didn’t have kids.”