Some video of the quintuplets first meeting with Rachelle

First, I want to say thanks for all of the really nice comments for my previous post. I sort of got going and just wrote a bunch of stuff from my heart so I am glad that it seemed to come across as I intended it. I really have been hoping from the beginning that our story would give hope to people and help them know that miracles really are possible.

For a few days after Rachelle gave birth to Rustin, Ryder, Kassidy, Kaydence, and Kyndall, she didn't get to see them. During a press conference, one of the doctors told me that she thought they would be able to take them over to her room to see her for a short amount of time. The light wasn't very good but I took some video of the meeting anyway. The babies are all doing well. My dad and mom (Kevin and Sylvia Wilkinson) came to see them and had a great time holding and feeding babies. They are all still attached to a bunch of tubes and Rustin still has a bit of a breathing issue but they are all doing well. I am especially grateful when I see some of the other poor babies in the NICU. Some of them are not doing nearly as well as ours and my heart really goes out to all those who have babies that really struggle.




One of the really cool things about having quintuplets is that a bunch of professional photographers are interested in taking pictures of your babies. There was a great photographer at the birth that took some really wonderful pictures. You might have seen them because they used them in the newspapers and the news reports but they are awesome. We hope to be able to show more later. There is a decent change that some of the pictures will be in a Newsweek article some time in the next few weeks but I will let you know for sure. They can always change those things if something more significant comes up. Speaking of that, there is also a decent chance we could be on the CBS Early Show but I don't know for sure yet. If we are, I will try to let you all know. If we did, that would mean I would probably have to be there at 4:00 AM which is a little early. However, it would be fun to share our story with a big group of people like that so I won't mind. It will probably be a small taste of what the next few months are going to be like anyway.

Something else I wanted to mention is that my team at work (Sean Eason, Chris Roysden, Mitch Wilson, and Mike Devlin) are all preparing right now for NIWeek. NIWeek is an annual conference National Instruments has every year in the convention center in Austin. Normally, I would be in charge of the AV portion of the keynote speeches during that week. As you might guess, I am not there right now and have left it in the hands of my team (particularly Sean Eason). Thus far, they have done a remarkable job making the necessary preparations to pull it off and I am really grateful to them for that. I just wanted to wish them good luck as they go into this next week and let them know how really grateful I am to them for everything they are doing. To check out what they are doing, you can probably see some of the video posts of it next week on:
ni.com/niweek