Getting Married

Jayson and Rachelle met at Brigham Young University while Rachelle was working on a degree in Statistics and Jayson was working on a degree in Mechanical Engineering.  Jayson had grown up mainly in Colorado while Rachelle had spent her youth in a variety of places including Texas, Hawaii, and Arizona.  When they met, Rachelle was actually the Teaching Assistant in Jayson’s "Statistics for Engineers" class. 

They started dating in February 1997(during the second month of class) and were engaged two months later on the day of Rachelle's graduation.  They had a lengthy engagement of about 4 months (fairly standard for Utah) and got married on August 14th 1997 in the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Graduation, Jobs, and Kids

After graduating from BYU, they moved to Austin where Jayson took a job at National Instruments as an Applications Engineer and Rachelle took a job at 3M as a Statistical Consultant.  On Father's Day in June of 2000, Riley (actually Jayson Riley) was born. Rachelle left 3M to stay home with Riley and occasionally teach Statistics classes at night at Austin Community College (ACC).  Then about three years later, in March of 2003, Kaiya was born. 

Jayson still works at National Instruments but in multimedia production and Rachelle is still teaching Statistics at ACC. 

This is a picture taken just a few months before Rachelle got pregnant.

Having Quintuplets

In early 2007, after several years of trying to have just one more child, Rachelle and Jayson found out they were pregnant with quintuplets. Initially, this was a big shock and they were not sure what to do since most in the medical world stronly recommended reducing to twins. After a whole lot of small miracles, they decided to ignore the advice they received and do whatever they could to get those babies here safely. One of the most significant of these miracles was finding Dr. John Elliott in Phoenix Arizona. He is a doctor that specializes in high order multiples and agreed to take Rachelle on as a patient. Rachelle moved to Arizona to live with her aunt Jeanie while Jayson stayed at home in Texas to work and get the house ready.

IAt 34 weeks, on July 31, 2007, Rachelle and Jayson became the parents to some of the healtiest and heaviest quintuplets ever born. After that, things REALLY started to get complicated but much less complicated than it could have been for which they are very grateful. For the full story, read Rachelle's blog here.