A similar scene unfolds nightly in a two-story house in Thach Hoa Commune, Quang Tri Province, where Mai Thi Thao, 32, and her husband Tran Van Sinh, 37, live.

The three hammocks are hung in a triangle at the center of a room so that she can care for the newborns. “Eating on our feet and sleeping sitting up is my and my husband’s specialty,” she says.

They have eight children, seven of them boys. Their eldest is 13 years old.

In 2021 the couple left HCMC for Quang Tri during the Covid-19 pandemic, and used their savings to buy a container truck for Sinh to work as a long-haul driver while Thao stayed home to care for the children.

During her sixth pregnancy in 2025, multiple ultrasounds had showed she was having twins, and so the couple prepared clothes and baby items in pairs.

At 33 weeks Thao went into emergency labor as her cervix dilated quickly. Two baby boys were delivered, each weighing 2.1 kilograms. As she breathed a sigh of relief, a doctor said, “There is still one more baby!”

The third boy, weighing two kilograms, was then delivered to the surprise of everyone in the operating room.

Minh Dat and Minh Khiem are identical twins while Minh Khoi is fraternal. The identical twins overlapped in the womb, and so the third baby was not detected by ultrasound.

When Thao went into labor, Sinh was working more than 1,000 kilometers away in Tien Giang Province.

He says he was shocked when he received the call. “My legs went weak. I was worried about my wife’s health, about the premature babies, and about how we could afford to raise them all.”

He hired another driver to help finish his job and rushed to the Vietnam-Cuba Dong Hoi Friendship Hospital, where the newborns were in incubators.

At the hospital, he held his wife and said: “Children are blessings. We will raise them however hard it is, on simple meals if we have to.”

A few days later Sinh resumed work, leaving Thao to care for three newborns and five young children at home.

Thao says the hardest times are when a child falls ill. One day in early winter the eldest came home coughing, and by next day the other seven were also sick.

“There were nights when I carried one child after another, listening to all of them coughing. I would break down in tears because I was exhausted and overwhelmed, but wipe my tears away. If I fall apart, who will take care of them?”

The older siblings help care for the younger ones, however.

The five-year-old prepares milk for the babies and sometimes eats spoonfuls of milk powder himself if his mother is not watching.

The two eldest boys, aged 11 and 13, can slaughter chickens and help their mother sell them online for extra money.

Thao My, just over two years old, also helps by rocking the hammocks or adjusting the pillows when a baby turns in his sleep. “Sibling bonds grow naturally like grass and trees; I do not have to teach them much,” Thao says.

The household’s monthly expenses total VND30 million (US$1,150), with diapers and milk for the triplets accounting for nearly a third.

Sinh bears most of the financial burden.

Six days before Tet earlier this month, as many families gathered for the Kitchen Gods ritual, he was sitting in his truck at the Mong Cai border crossing with China, waiting to make a delivery.

For five months his phone has been his main connection with his children. He had a delivery to the Mekong Delta scheduled before he could go home for Tet.

The couple say they are often exhausted and sometimes wish the children would grow up quickly so they could have a full night’s sleep. But when they look at old photos and see their eldest son now nearly as tall as his father, they feel a pang of nostalgia.

Thao says, rocking the three hammocks: “I am afraid that one day the house will become too quiet when the children grow up and leave. By then, even if I want to work hard to care for them, I will not be able to.”

Quang Binh’s mother gave birth to 8 children at the age of 32