Charlotte mom of 3 boys prayed for a girl for years. Then 4 more babies came — all at once.
Carlos and Ronjera Abrahams got married in a Missouri bar that they can’t recall the name of.
Not because they’d been drinking. It’s just, well, it’s been a while — 15 years — and the bar wasn’t part of the plan.
Carlos was 19 and a new Marine, in training at Fort Leonard Wood. Ronjera, then 18, was visiting from their shared home state of Delaware. The original plan was to tie the knot at the local courthouse, but training ran long, so Carlos was running late. When he called the judge to tell her, she informed them she was leaving work for the day. They were probably out of luck.
“‘Unless,’” Carlos recalls her saying, “you want to meet me at the bar I own down the street. I could do it there...”
They said “Sure,” then they said “I Do,” and so began a long line of significant instances in which Carlos and Ronjera Abrahams had expected things to go a particular way — only to have things, in reality, go not that way at all.
It happened again just a few hours later. They had talked about starting a family someday. Carlos wanted to have just one child, since he’d grown up with five brothers and thought that would be the best way to guarantee he could properly spoil a kid as a parent. Ronjera wanted three, but was willing to stop at two, if at least one was a girl. They had, Ronjera says, a five-year plan. Five years to enjoy being young and newlywed, during which time they could get more closely aligned on how many kids they wanted.
And “I got pregnant the night we got married,” she says. “So ... that didn’t work out.”
Their son Carlos was born in 2011. When Ronjera found out she was pregnant again, about four years later, she started buying cute baby girls’ clothes, just in case; and in 2016, they welcomed another son, Christian. Ronjera then added “a little girl” to the prayer wall in their closet upstairs; but in 2020 — shortly after Carlos left the Marines and they moved to Charlotte — came a third boy, Cameron.
Shortly after that, she started drafting a book in the Notes app on her phone under the working title “The Reward After the Wait,” which she wrote as if she was pregnant with a baby girl she’d already named Aniyah. She only got about two chapters done. Parenting their non-fictional kids was keeping her too busy.
In fact, it felt like they’d been taking care of kids since they’d gotten married in that bar.
By springtime of last year, though, they had reached a point where parenting was getting easier, or at least a point where they were comfortable leaving them with a sitter so they could explore Charlotte as a couple. “I mean, we was livin’ it up. We went on date nights more, like, just having a good time. Like, finally.”
She laughs. “We were having too much fun. I think that’s what happened. God was like, ‘Let me sit y’all all the way down. Y’all not ready for that yet.’”
‘All I care about is there’s girls’
Ronjera found out she was carrying triplets — spontaneously, meaning having been conceived without fertility treatments — in June of last year.
“I was just really shocked. I was crying, too. The ultrasound tech hugged me, doctors hugged me. I think the first thought I had was, How did I go from three to six? What just happened??” But along with the massive initial shock came a wave of joy, she says, when “the ultrasound tech told me that, because they were in their own amniotic sacs, they would be different sexes. That’s when I was like, Okayyy. There gotta be a girl in there somewhere!
“That’s when I got happy. I was like, All I care about is there’s girls.”
There was just one thing, though, that Ronjera and Carlos weren’t aware of at the time. Or, rather, just one more thing.
Around Ronjera’s 10th week, they went back in for another check-up. By this point, it had sunk in that their brood was to double in size. They were ready. Excited, even. After all, Ronjera was going to be able to take the tags off those pink baby clothes, and check “little girl” off the prayer wall, and maybe even get back to working on that book she’d started writing.
Then the appointment took a dramatic turn.
The Abrahams were engaging in some friendly banter during the ultrasound with the tech when she suddenly let loose with a little laugh. “What’s so funny?” they asked, wanting in on the joke. This was actually pretty serious, though. It was more that the tech was incredulous. “I’m laughing,” she replied, “because there’s another baby.”
Ronjera started crying. Bawling, actually. “I just was really scared with the four,” she says. “I looked over at my husband, and I was like, ‘What we gonna do?’ He’s like, ‘We gonna take care of ’em.’”
So they did, almost immediately. When presented soon after with the option of reducing the number of fetuses by two — they said they were told quadruplets can strain marriages and finances, but the procedure could also potentially reduce the risk of complications — the Abrahams nixed the notion immediately.
“That,” Ronjera says, matter-of-factly, “just don’t happen.”
The option presented, by the way, was to stop the hearts on the babies then being referred to as “C” and “D.”
Baby D turned out to be a girl the Abrahams named Ariyah. Baby C? That one turned out to be a girl, too — the one Ronjera had dreamed up in her book draft: Aniyah.
Much smaller than a 1 in 700,000 chance
Ronjera made the rest of it look easy.
Overall, she says, it was the easiest of her four pregnancies. She attributes that to being in better-than-ever shape, having taken up a new regimen of walking four miles a day after Cameron was born in 2020 and thanks to a healthier diet.
When the water on one of her amniotic sacs broke at just over 30 weeks, this past Dec. 1, it happened hours after her afternoon baby shower had ended and — fortuitously — minutes after visiting family members had helped them by assembling the four new cribs in their nursery. Identical girls Aniyah and Ariyah and identical boys Carter and Cayden were born via C-section late the next morning.
On top of that, while the babies had a few assorted setbacks during their stay in Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center’s Hemby Intensive Care Nursery, it was generally a breeze.
Whereas multiples routinely are kept in NICUs until their due date, the Abrahams quads were discharged on Jan. 7, exactly one month before their original due date; and whereas multiples often are discharged at separate times, the Abrahams got lucky again.
“They went home all together,” says Phyllis Waddell, a Novant Health nurse manager who was present for the babies’ births and helped oversee their care. “I mean, even for twins, most twins don’t go home together that are born (prematurely). So it’s very unusual that you would have four babies ready to go home at the same time.”
Of course, that’s a huge oversimplification of what was a much more complicated set of circumstances (and an extremely rare set of circumstances: Waddell says the odds of quadruplets are 1 in 700,000, with 90% of those quads conceived via fertility treatments.)
It’s similarly a big understatement to say there are trials ahead for Ronjera and Carlos Abrahams now that they have seven kids.
Sleep deprivation. Seemingly endless cycles of feeding and diaper-changing. Logistical challenges — for instance, even just loading up the SUV with kids to go to the store is a production. Financial pressures, including the fact that going to work — he owns the west Charlotte restaurant Crave’n Caribbean, she does hair and dabbles in interior design — translates to income, but it also means needing to shell out for child care. Balancing attention among the four infants, plus making time for the older three, not to mention each other.
But they say their marriage is actually stronger than ever. They lean on each other more than ever. They do feel tired a lot, they do feel overwhelmed a lot, but they also feel a great deal of joy. And they feel incredibly blessed.
“We may not understand it right now,” Ronjera says, “but I think that with time, we will understand why there’s four. God knows what he’s doing. ... I also think that if (I had gotten pregnant again with just one), it would have been another boy,” she says, laughing.
“So maybe this is how I had to get my girl.”
A GoFundMe page has been created to help buy the Ronjeras a family van. For details and to contribute: gofundme.com/f/help-quadruplets-family-get-a-van.
This story was originally published February 20, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
