Octomom celebrated her octuplets ninth birthday by sharing a video of them wearing inflatable crowns and blowing out the candles on a cake.
Mom-of-14 Natalie Suleman posted the sweet video to Instagram Friday writing: ‘Sharing a small part of the little kids 9th birthday from two weeks ago. They had a wonderful time bouncing at Pump it Up again this year before several of us were stricken with the flu.’
As the video pans across the kids, all wearing colorful crowns and buttons declaring ‘its my birthday’ an unseen crowd sings Happy Birthday, trying to fit in all eight names – Makai, Josiah, Isaiah, Jonah, Maliyah, Jeremiah, Nariyah and Noah – before the newly minted nine-year-olds blow out the candles on a cake that also bears all eight names.
Octomom Natalie Suleman celebrates the octuplets’ ninth with crowns and a cake bearing all eight names
Some of the octoplets pose for photos as they wait to blow out their candles
Singing all eight names during ‘Happy Birthday’ made the whole family crack up
Natalie, formerly known as Nadya, made headlines in 2009 when it was revealed that she was pregnant with the octuplets.
At 31 years old, she was already the mother of six, and was unemployed.
All of her children were conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF), she has said she paid for the treatments with a combination of overtime pay and inheritance money. She used eggs she had frozen for the earlier pregnancies to conceive the octuplets.
Dubbed Octomom, Suleman became a public personality and supported her large family by starring in porn films, including Octomom Home Alone, and making appearances at strip clubs.
But now she’s trying to put her Octomom persona behind her, and in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com in December, she revealed: ‘What she was disgusted me and I did not want my children to remember me like that. I was forced into doing things I didn’t want to do because I was so terrified I couldn’t support them and give them the life I deserved.
‘When I abandoned it and went back to who I really am I had that sense of peace, internal joy.
Five of the eight octoplets crowd around a the cake to blow out their nine candles
All the candles out in one try, not surprising with eight people blowing!
Natalie shared this throwback picture from when she was pregnant with the octuplets on Instagram, she has six older children
‘Struggle is the best teacher. I have become more grateful for every minute of every day – little moments, not material things, can measure up to those times I have with my family.’
Recalling the moment she realized she had to turn a corner she said: ‘I was so low I was taking prescription drugs, benzodiazepines.
‘I had to medicate to just get through what I was doing. I would mix it with alcohol which I later found out was what Whitney Houston, died from.
‘I didn’t want to be here anymore, but then I thought about my children and just had to keep going for them.’
She told how her breaking point came after she was approached by a stranger one night while she was working as a stripper.
‘I was in a strip club in Florida in February 2013, and this very tall man, this stranger came in. He walked straight to me and looked straight into my eyes
He took my hand and grabbed my arm and said in a very gentle but firm way: “You do not have to do this.” He repeated it five times.
‘I couldn’t control the tears that were streaming down my face. I had that ugly feeling of nausea. I looked down for a moment, and looked up and he was gone,’ she says.
The octuplets posed on a playground for a Christmas picture.
Natalie says she thought it was possible the man could have been ‘an angel’ and she decided to make a change: ‘I knew I had to be my healthy self again. I didn’t want my kids not to have a mom.’
As Natalie tried to turn her life around, she was found guilty of welfare fraud, a verdict that has since been expunged from her record.
Today, she works part time as a drug and alcohol counselor, and raises her family, Elijah, 16, Amerah, 15, Joshua, 13, Aiden, 11, and 10-year-old twins Calyssa and Caleb along with the octuplets in a tiny apartment in Orange County, California.