One Big Happy Family

Shark Michael Claassens and his wife, Helen, had almost given up hope of having children. Then along came five!

- Jacques Myburgh 

A LITTLE girl tears down the passage on her tricycle and on the veranda two toddlers are busily making a racket. And all the while two babies sleep peacefully in their dad’s arms, oblivious to the happy chaos around them.

This is the Ballito home of KwaZulu­ Natal Sharks scrumhalf Michael Claassens, his wife, Helen, and their brood: three­year­old daughter Jóco, twin brother and sister Michael and Anick (2) and the newest addition to their family, another pigeon pair, Beauden and Teagen (7 weeks).

“I wish I could tell you that it’s not normally like this but I’d be lying,” Helen (34) says of the sweet cacophony. “This is what our home is like every day.”

Amid all this laughter and hubbub, it’s hard to believe that the couple almost gave up hope of ever having kids.

“I was beaten; I was on the ground,” Helen says of the long years they tried and failed to conceive.

Eventually in 2013, seven years after they married, Helen fell pregnant with Jóco through artificial insemination.

Doctors reckoned she probably would never conceive naturally, but after another round of failed IVF treatment and two miscarriages from natural pregnancies, their dream finally came true.

“God blessed us with two more natural pregnancies – and two sets of twins,” Michael (34) says.

“We’ve walked a very long and difficult road. And I never ever thought we’d end up with five children.”

Michael and Helen always dreamt of having a big family. “I wanted three kids, but Helen always wanted five,” Michael says.

In 2007 Michael landed a contract with English rugby club Bath and he and Helen upped sticks and moved to the UK.