At the last house on a quiet West Oak Cliff street, 29-year-old Brenda Raymundo answers the front door. Inside, it’s anything but quiet: one baby slides across the wooden floor, another crawls under a coffee table, the third jumps up and down a walker, the fourth is in Grandmother’s arms of Grandmother, and the fifth is in a playpen.

A year ago, Raymundo was expecting five babies in a high-risk pregnancy, cared for by doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital. When she got the news, she was perplexed—after undergoing fertility treatment, she was hoping for two, maybe three, but not five children. There have only been four births of quintuplet in Parkland’s history.

Last May 17, Amara, Humberto, Leilany, Antonio “Tony,” and Alejandro “Alex” were born at 31 weeks. They spent a couple of weeks in an incubator, fed with their mother’s and other donors’ milk. Every day, Raymundo and her husband, Alejandro Ibarra, 28, went to visit them. One by one, they took their babies home; the last one on July 30. Since then, the Ibarras’ home has been a sweet mess.

“I really think they’re calm babies, they’re not hard work,” said Raymundo, while one of her babies babbled and tried wriggle into her arms.

Almost a year later, Raymundo continues to update the world on her children and her life as she celebrates her first Mother’s Day as a mom of quintuplets. When she got the news she would be a mother of five, she opened a TikTok account because she felt she would benefit from sharing her new life online. She uploads videos every once in a while and she currently has 250,000 followers and 3 million likes.

Grandma to the rescue

Luckily, María Acosta, 49, Raymundo’s mother, helps her. Two of the babies sleep with her at night, the other three with Raymundo and her husband. All of the babies, except for Alex, fall asleep at around 9 p.m., and wake up at around 10 a.m.

“Yes, they get annoyed like any normal child, when they’re hungry or sleepy, but I expected it to be more work,” she said

Sometimes, in the afternoons, they all cry at the same time, and she knows exactly who is crying. One cries more hoarsely, another just screams, one more sounds like a “little lamb,” she said.

The Ibarras’ home is like a daycare with two caregivers. There’s lullabies playing on a tv and the babies turn to listen when “Baby Shark” comes on in Spanish. Tiburón do do do do, do, tiburón…

Acosta describes the personality of the babies: Amara and Leilany are more detail-oriented and like books; Alex is more attached and likes being sung to and being held; Tony likes to pick fights; and Humberto is the explorer who likes to roam around the house.

Life at home

Raymundo talks to her babies in Spanish because she said she knows they will learn English as soon as they start school and that it will probably become their primary language. Raymundo and her husband’s families are both originally from Teocaltiche, in Jalisco, Mexico.

At around 2 p.m., the quints’ father, Alejandro Ibarra, the father opens the front door. He’s dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, a hat, jeans and worn out working boots. Tony, one of the babies, listens to him and crawls to the door as fast as he can, but misses him. He cries when Ibarra enters the bathroom.

“I’m going to wash my hands,” Ibarra tells him. He finishes up and grabs him from the floor to hug him. Amara crawls toward him as he sits on the couch.

“This is a beautiful experience that I never could have imagined,” Ibarra said. “It’s something very unexpected, and difficult, and it gets even harder.”

Ibarra is self-employed, buying and selling used cars and metal.

The most expensive thing about this stage of the babies’ life is the diapers, and the family gladly accepts donations.

Not much time to think about the future

The family hasn’t gone out much in the past year. They did take one trip to Houston, where they attended mass and the priest presented the quintuplets to parishioners. Some said, “Wow,” Acosta recalls; others simply murmured or smiled.

Raymundo said that sometimes she can’t escape criticism or judgment, like once when a TikTok user commented on her account that they would kill themselves if they had quintuplets.

The young mother dreams of becoming a licensed real estate agent so she can buy a house of her own, because they are currently living in her mother’s home. She wants to be self-employed and take care of her children. She doesn’t want to send them to daycare, even on the days when she feels exhausted.

“Sometimes I feel desperate, but it’s usually when I don’t sleep well, like when they were born—we looked like zombies, barely slept, but now they sleep more,” Raymundo said, unbothered by the loud cry of one of the babies.

When asked if she would ever want more children, she paused for a moment and said yes, maybe when all five are older.

For now, there’s not much time to think about the future.

“It’s never boring; there is no time to get bored,” Raymundo said.