Wichita ? A day after their birth, the Kansas sextuplets were improving so rapidly that one of them was able to take breast milk through a feeding tube, doctors said Sunday.

Four of the infants remained on respirators, but the settings were so minimal that doctors expect to begin weaning them off the machines in the next 24 to 48 hours, Dr. Katherine Schooley said.

“They are absolutely excellent  we are very pleased with the babies’ size, growth and development,” Schooley said.

Mother Sondra Headrick, 33, and her husband Eldon, 32, live in Rago, about 40 miles southwest of Wichita, which until Saturday had a population of 12.

Headrick carried the children  three boys and three girls  for 31 weeks, the longest any woman in the United States has carried sextuplets, Dr. Van Bohman said.

The babies  named Ethan Roy, Melissa Sue, Grant Douglas, Sean Edward, Jaycie Linette and Danielle Patrice  are to be hospitalized for four to six weeks. Their mother is expected to go home in a few days.

Only 96 sets of sextuplets have been born worldwide since recording began in the early 1900s, said doctors at Via Christi Regional Medical Center-St. Joseph, where a 24-member medical team delivered the babies by Caesarean section Saturday afternoon.

The sextuplets were born a day after another Wichita couple, Christina and Patrick Tetrick, had a healthy set of quadruplets  two sets of identical boys at a hospital across town.