What did you do on your first date with your spouse? The common reply is dinner and a movie, or maybe meeting for coffee. For Hannah Donaghue her answer is a bit more out there; she got pregnant with triplets.
Oops.
Donaghue is a 29-year-old woman from the UK. She uses contraceptives like birth control pills to allow her to date and fraternize freely, without risk of unwanted pregnancy. The pill, if used perfectly, has a 99% success rate of stopping egg fertilization and in common practice has about a 91% success rate.
That means Donaghue was either very lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you look at things.
"I had split up with my boyfriend at this point and wasn't looking to meet anyone new," she recounted to Ladbible. "But then I bumped into Ben at a party."
It must have been quite the bump because a few weeks later Donaghue made a doctor's appointment after she had some unusual bleeding. The doctor said she could be pregnant.
"I lay on the table and the sonographer ran the scanner over my stomach. 'There's one heartbeat. And there's the second one,'" she said.
Donaghue didn't believe there were two babies inside her at first, turns out she was right.
"And there's the third one," the sonographer told Donaghue.
"I thought she must have been joking. I was still in shock as she pointed out the three heartbeats flickering on the screen."
She had called Ben Fagan, the babies' father, when the doctor's first told her she might be pregnant. He dutifully arrived and stayed with Donaghue through her scans.
"I couldn't believe it - and neither could Ben. I hadn't even been expecting to fall pregnant with one baby again - let alone three."
The two talked and Ben said he'd stand by her through it all. The two began to actually date while Donaghue was carrying their children.
"Even though we were expecting three children together, we didn't want to rush things," Donaghue said of their unconventional romance.
Multi-baby pregnancies are rarely simple and Donaghue had potentially dangerous complication. At 28 weeks, the triplets began moving less and doctors prescribed steroids to boost their lung development in case of premature delivery.
Donaghue hung on until 32 weeks, giving birth to two girls and a boy, Ella Rose, Kasey, and Lester, by C-section.
"They were so tiny but they were really strong and we were allowed to take them home after 18 days. By this point, Ben had moved in and for the first few weeks it felt like a whirlwind had hit the house."
Strangely, this wasn't Donaghue's first time being pregnant while on the pill. She actually already had two children despite being on contraceptives.
"The triplets have more than doubled our family," she said. "I've also traded in my Mini for a seven-seater car - and I've well and truly given up on the pill."