Woman who gave birth to four babies using IVF feeds them 224 bottles of milk every WEEK

However demanding your week has been, spare a thought for Tracey Britten, the UK’s oldest mother to give birth to quadruplets.

Over the past seven days, Tracey, 51, has fed her babies 224 bottles of formula milk, changed 168 nappies, dressed her offspring 56 times and dished out 28 baths, all on less than three hours’ sleep a night.

While her husband Stephen, 39, mucks in when he’s home, he works full-time, so she can perhaps be excused for not having washed her hair for six weeks — and only taking the quads outdoors on her own once since they came home from hospital last month.

‘You do have moments late at night when you think: “Oh my God, what have I done?” admits Tracey, who is alone with the babies for up to 12 hours a day. ‘It’s hard graft. But then, quick as a flash, I think: “It’s only for a few months — they will be able to feed themselves soon.”

‘I don’t regret it. I wouldn’t have had them if I didn’t want them — and it will get easier.

‘Some people may think it’s selfish to become a mum again at my age, but I don’t worry about not being around to see my babies grow up. I’m fit and healthy and look after myself, so I fully expect to live long enough to see my grandchildren.

‘I may be the oldest mum at the school gates, but who cares? Most women are leaving it later to have kids nowadays, and people always tell me I look much younger than I am.’

Tracey and Stephen had IVF treatment in Cyprus and admits she was dumbfounded, when she saw the scan, pictured, asking the sonographer: ‘How am I going to cope with four babies?’

She does indeed look younger than her years, but one can’t help but wonder how she will cope with the challenge once her babies start crawling in four different directions.

Her three little girls and a boy were delivered by Caesarean section, 31 weeks into her pregnancy, at London’s University College Hospital on October 26 last year.

Tracey and Stephen had travelled overseas for IVF treatment at the Team Miracle Cyprus IVF Centre, in what was a final roll of the dice after ten years of trying for a baby. It was their first attempt at IVF, and cost £7,000.

In all, four embryos were implanted into Tracey’s womb; three survived, one of which split into two, creating identical twin girls.

Tracey was already a mother to three grown-up children — a daughter and two sons — and grandmother to eight, aged between 11 and one, while Stephen, a roofer, has a teenage son.

The couple’s desperate desire to become parents again was, admits Tracey, rooted in the guilt and trauma she felt after having a late abortion, aged 39, because the ‘timing wasn’t right for a baby’.

Tracey, pictured while pregnant with the quads, is also a mother to her three grown-up children and grandmother to eight

She deeply regretted the termination, carried out when she was 19 weeks pregnant, and sank into a depression. This was compounded when her beloved mother, Pauline, died unexpectedly six weeks later, due to a blockage in the main artery to her heart.

Tracey convinced herself this was karma, a punishment for ending her unborn son’s life. Shortly after her 50th birthday, Tracey decided to use the cash her late mother had left in her will to fund IVF treatment in Cyprus, where the clinic implanted four embryos at once, which doctors said would maximise her chances of conceiving — a strategy that is not permitted in the UK to prevent risky multiple births.

Although Tracey knew it was a possibility, she admits she burst into tears after discovering she was carrying quads at her nine-week scan.

Dumbfounded, she asked the sonographer: ‘How am I going to cope with four babies?’

Two weeks later, Tracey, who has a history of premature labour, developed severe stomach pains. She went to her local hospital, where doctors advised her to ‘reduce’ the pregnancy by having two of the foetuses injected in the womb to stop their hearts.

This, she was told, would increase the remaining two babies’ chances of survival. But Tracey had bonded with her quads, after seeing them in numerous scans, and could not contemplate saying goodbye to any of them. Her decision to ‘let nature take its course’ paid off, and the quads — George, Grace and twins Fredrica and Francesca — are now 12 weeks old.

At birth, George was the heaviest at 3lb 10oz, Francesca was 2lb 12oz, Grace 2lb 7oz and Fredrica a tiny 1lb 15oz.

When I arrive at the family’s three-bedroom bungalow in North London, I fully expect to be greeted by a dishevelled Tracey surrounded by bottles, nappies, baby wipes, vomit-streaked muslin cloths and a cacophony of screaming.

However, the place is clean and tidy and the girls are either sleeping or sitting calmly in their bouncy chairs while George — still the biggest by far at around a stone in weight — is fresh out of the bath.

‘People expect to walk into a madhouse, then comment on how calm it is,’ says Tracey. ‘I think it’s because I was calm during pregnancy. I tried not to let anything stress me. and if I did feel stressed I put on some meditation music.

‘Of course, I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I decided to just take each day as it comes.’

As Tracey puts the kettle on to make us tea (I offer, but she insists!) I notice a long, handwritten list on the kitchen counter detailing all the times each baby has been fed using miniature bottles of prescription-only formula, designed for premature infants. A peek inside the fridge reveals 24 more bottles lined up ready for the day ahead.

‘We had to start writing everything down, because in the early days we’d forget which ones had been fed,’ says Tracey. ‘We kept the hospital name tags on their ankles, too, so we could tell them apart. We couldn’t always be sure, especially in the dead of night.

‘Now we can tell who’s who at a glance, partly because Fredrica is smaller than Francesca and the other two look different.’

Tracey has fed her babies 224 bottles of formula milk over the past seven days. Pictured is the mother on This Morning with Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield

The quads spent six weeks in incubators and there were setbacks, including George catching flu at two weeks and Fredrica struggling to digest her tube-fed formula milk.

George also has reflux for which he has been prescribed Gaviscon, which makes him constipated.

Still, three of them were allowed home on December 8, two days before Tracey’s 51st birthday, while Fredrica was finally feeding well enough to join her siblings a week before Christmas, at nearly eight weeks old. 

They now sleep two to a cot beside their parents’ double bed. By the time they move into the nursery, at around six months old, Tracey is hoping to buy two twin cots so that they can all fit comfortably into one room.

While prematurity and low birth weight are risk factors for numerous conditions, including cerebral palsy, vision problems and hearing loss, the quads appear to be healthy and reaching their milestones. Doctors at the Whittington Hospital in North London will keep an eye on their development, as difficulties are not always obvious so early on.

Luckily for their parents, the babies rarely cry all at once — except for the evening they had their eight-week injections: ‘They were obviously in pain and cried all night,’ Tracey recalls.

‘Thankfully, they were fine the following day.’

Last week, however, Tracey went 24 hours without closing her eyes, because at least one baby was crying for attention throughout that time.

‘I had to keep moving, rocking them and doing jobs, because I knew if I sat still I would nod off,’ she says. ‘Usually they sleep for about four or five hours in the daytime, and I should really take that opportunity to rest, too, but I’ve got so much to do: making up bottles, laundry, cleaning, making the beds and cots. By the time I’ve done all that, it’s feeding and winding time again.

‘It’s hard to describe what it’s like, to be honest. It sometimes feels as though I’m having an out-of-body experience and watching someone else do it.’

Keeping on top of all this would be a huge challenge for any mother, but for a woman in her sixth decade — with a touch of arthritis and a bad back — it sounds crippling.

But while admitting she is utterly exhausted, Tracey claims that, in some ways, she is coping better than she did as a young mum.

‘Obviously, it’s a lot harder than when I had just one baby at a time,’ she says. ‘But I’m older now and have more patience. I was only 18 when I had my eldest daughter and you think you’re missing out on things at that age.

‘Everyone is going out and telling you what a great time they’re having, but I’ve done all that now.’

Still, these days most of her contemporaries are enjoying precious leisure time as their children become self-sufficient, while Tracey will be 68 before her quads come of age.

But she appears to have a remarkable ability not to project her thoughts beyond the here and now — a quality she believes is at the root of her babies’ easy-going temperaments.

Having raised ‘three good kids’, she’s not worried about coping with teenagers in her 60s, either.

At 39, Stephen is more than a decade younger than his wife and a very capable, hands-on dad who, despite having to be up for work at 5am, is in charge of grocery shopping and cooking dinner.

But there was one day recently when Stephen left for work and Tracey realised he’d forgotten to buy milk for her tea.

The prospect of 12 hours in sole charge of four babies without caffeine was too much to bear, so Tracey decided to wheel them to the local shop.

It took her 20 minutes to assemble the pram, then another 20 minutes to get the babies into their warm snow suits and strapped in.

The ten-minute walk stretched into half an hour as one passerby after another stopped to look into the pram and ask questions. That was the first and last time Tracey — who says the weight of the pram put a strain on her bad back — has ventured out with them alone.

So when any of the quads has a medical appointment, Stephen, who has a very understanding boss, must take a day off work to drive them there. Tracey can’t take all the babies as their special pram will not fit into the family’s Ford Galaxy — they are looking for a second-hand Mercedes Viano.

When anyone refers to him as ‘the proud father’, Stephen jovially replies: ‘Exhausted father, more like. My mates at work tease me about how long it’ll be before I can have a night out with them again.

‘But I don’t want to go out,’ he adds. ‘The idea of getting home after a few drinks and having to do the night shift, or coping with four babies when you’ve got a hangover is too awful.

‘The tiredness is the hardest thing — when you know you’ve got to be up for work and you’ve had no sleep.

‘At the moment, all they need is to be fed and cleaned but when they start running around it might be trickier.’

Although Stephen must keep bringing home the bacon — the nappy bill alone comes to nearly £100 a month, that doesn’t mean he gets to put his feet up at the end of a working day. ‘He’ll say: “I’m going to have a soak in the bath”, and I’ll say: “Never mind that, be quick and come and see to these bloody kids — I’ve no time for a soak,” ’ says Tracey, laughing throatily.

‘I even shout to hurry up when he’s in the loo, and he complains he can’t sit on the couch because there are babies on every cushion.’

Being constantly on the move means Tracey regained her figure in record time, and was able to fit back into her size 12 jeans two weeks after giving birth.

She certainly doesn’t look like a woman who gave birth to quads less than three months ago.

She is also relieved that, despite criticism levelled at her while pregnant — she was called ‘selfish’ for having IVF at 50, resulting in quads whose care is ‘likely to cost the NHS hundreds of thousands of pounds’ — public opinion since the birth has been much more supportive.

Her one regret is that her babies aren’t getting the one-to-one attention she was able to give her older children.

‘With one, you can cuddle them all the time,’ she says. ‘But at the hospital they told me to put them down after each feed so they don’t get too used to being held and cry when they’re laid down — I’ve only got one pair of arms.

‘Instead, if they’re all awake I put cartoons on the TV and face their bouncy chairs towards it.’

Using television to distract infants may go against normal parenting advice, but it’s clear that Tracey — who’s hoping for recognition as Britain’s oldest mum of quads in the Guinness Book of Records — will have little time in the foreseeable future to worry about social conventions.