Rago ? A fierce wind blowing across the Kansas prairie kept popping the balloons Candice Howard was trying to put on homemade signs welcoming home the parents of sextuplets to this tiny community.

Grinning, she instead filled their small house with the 50 balloons. Howard, who is married to Sondra Headrick’s brother, said the community is scrambling to help the couple  who had refused to have even a baby shower until they knew all the babies would be born healthy.

Sondra and her husband, Eldon, have brought worldwide attention to Rago  a collection of about a dozen houses in Kingman County about 40 miles southwest of Wichita  since the birth of their sextuplets on April 6.

Infants times 6,4,3,2

The Headrick sextuplets  the three boys and three girls are off respirators and doing well at the new neonatal care unit at Via Christi Medical Center  are only the latest in a boom of multiple births in Wichita.

A day earlier at a hospital across town, Christina and Patrick Tetrick gave birth to quadruplets  two identical sets of twins, an event that occurs about once every 25 million births without fertility drugs. The four boys had plenty of company in the intensive care nursery: four sets of triplets and four sets of twins, among them.

Other sets have already gone home in the last month  and another set of triplets and one of twins is expected at any time.

“This is unusual even for us  we are pretty used to twins and triplets but not all this many in such a short period of time,” said Helen Thomas, spokeswoman for Wesley Medical Center, a regional hospital with a neonatal care unit.

The hospital has not seen anything like it since 1996 Â when several in vitro fertilizations spawned a rash of multiple births in Wichita, she said.

No one is certain what is behind the latest baby boom.

While the sextuplets’ parents used fertility drugs, the parents of the quadruplets did not. The sextuplets, described by doctors as just the 96th set of sextuplets born worldwide since the early 1900s, are expected to be mature enough to go home in about a month, about the same time as the quadruplets.

Homecoming strategies

The sign outside the doughnut shop in nearby Norwich welcomed the Headricks home  97 days after Sondra first went into the hospital to await the birth of the state’s first set of sextuplets.

Inside the Norwich store, Letrice Lewis talked about the sextuplets as she fried doughnuts. The churches in town had put the Headricks on their prayer lists, and church members are signing up to help baby-sit.

“It is pretty exciting,” Lewis said.

The couple, who also have a 4-year-old daughter, Aubrianna, has mostly shunned publicity since the birth of the babies, coming out of seclusion for a brief news conference at the hospital last week.

Asked whether the family was ready for the babies, Eldon Headrick, a sewer department worker in Wichita, told reporters that they had hand-me-downs from Aubrianna to use, as well as other used clothing from other relatives.

James Barber, president of the Via Christi Foundation, said later the reply was typical for the Headricks: “They are really very humble about their approach of what they need.”

Dealing with the numbers

The foundation has been fielding donations for the family. Among them $6,000 worth of breast milk from the Texas milk bank, offers of baby-care products for a year, car seats and six knitted blankets from a Wichita woman.

For their part, the Tetricks have hired an advertising agency to help them meet the costs of their quadruplets. The agency has gotten them a leased nine-passenger van, and is lining up other donations from companies.

The Tetricks bought a two-bedroom home just days before finding out Christina was pregnant with quadruplets.

As for the Headricks, they live in a small, three-bedroom house just outside Rago. A stork poster taped outside their door is the only clue that anything extraordinary has happened.

LaVon Parsons has lived in Rago since 1953, and she has seen the tiny community wither along with other small Kansas towns. The grain elevator is open just seasonally now, and even the post office closed four years ago. About a dozen houses remain in the town, and a few more houses dot the farmland just outside the community.

“It is wonderful that they are all healthy, and she was able to carry them for so long,” Parsons said.