A Sioux City woman last week gave birth to Nebraska’s first quintuplets since 2009 and only the third set ever born in Nebraska.

Mother and infants were all reported in good condition Monday at Omaha’s Methodist Women’s Hospital as Bianca and Jose Garcia and two of their doctors met with the media for the first time with a news conference at the hospital.

Dr. Brady Kerr said Bianca Garcia gave birth by Caesarean section last Thursday, with a team of 35 doctors and nurses delivered the babies.

Once Garcia’s doctor determined she was going to have quints, about 6 weeks into her pregnancy, a team of medical experts began working with medication and other approaches to make sure she stayed pregnant as long as she could because health risks increase sharply the farther a birth is from full term.

Dr Todd Lovgren, a perinatologist who treated Bianca from the eighth week of her pregnancy and who operated to strengthen Garcia’s cervix, told the news conference that the couple and their doctors faced weeks of challenges.

“Every other week, every few days we had some sort of complications we had to overcome or a scare where she’d start having contractions and it was always ‘was this the day?'”

Lovgren said the goal was to reach at least 24 weeks, explaining that’s when babies are more likely to survive.  Garcia, on bed rest for more than 10 weeks, beat that minimum by a full month…giving birth at 28 weeks or only about 3 months premature, with each weighing about 2 pounds each.

The newborns…four girls and one boy named Marah, Christobal, Arleth, Jimena and Rosalyn…are under close watch in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit but that they “primarily need to grow.” Father Jose Garcia says he feels good, but that his wife is tired. The couple has two older children…sons ages 9 and 7.