3 LITTLE ANGELS

The Jacobs family have their hands full looking after Chloe, Claire and Cleo. Sadly their brother Cole didn’t make it

- KIM ABRAHAMS

LIFE is busy enough with just one baby – but when there are three bundles to care for, it’s go-go-go all the time. Berenice rises at 4am to feed the babies, goes through about 40 nappy changes in a day and somehow finds two and a half hours in her hectic schedule to pump breast milk.

Nights are an up-and-down affair with one of the girls often needing a feed, a change or a cuddle. But Berenice Jacobs says it’s all worth it. The triplets are a gift from God, even if she’s permanently exhausted.

Berenice (36) and her husband, Melvyn Loots (35), are now preparing to celebrate their first Christmas with three-month-old Chloe, Claire and Cleo – but although there is much joy there is also sadness.

The babies were born quadruplets but their brother, Cole, died when he was nine days old after developing a blood infection. Doctors at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town – where the quads were mini-celebrities – did their best to save him, but the little boy was too weak to fight the infection and died of heart failure.

Berenice was on her way home from the hospital’s newborn intensive care unit (NICU) where she’d just spent time with the babies when a nurse called her with the sad news.

“I was devastated,” she says. “I thought all four of them would come home with me.”

The day before he died Cole was struggling to breathe, she recalls. “He just suddenly became sick, he had lots of pipes in his tiny body.”

Melvyn didn’t get the chance to meet his son. Because of Covid-19 protocols, only one parent was allowed to visit the babies at the unit and he struggled to accept Cole’s death as he’d only seen him in pictures.