The nurses in the NICU of a Missouri hospital are busy having babies of their own.
The nurses in the NICU of Children's Mercy Hospital are busy taking care of a whole passel of babies, and the infants are their own.
The Missouri medical center is experiencing a baby boom among its nurses, with 20 babies born this year and another 16 on the way.
"It's been a wild ride," nurse Julie Lang told InsideEdition.com Thursday.
There are more than 300 nurses on staff in the neonatal intensive care unit, which is the highest-level NICU within a 200-mile radius of the Kansas City hospital. As a level IV facility, the unit cares for babies needing surgery and offers state-of-the-art medical care.
"We will take the sickest of the sick and the tiniest of the tiny," Lang said.
Right around the December holidays, she said, her fellow caregivers began noticing that an awful lot of them were pregnant. "We always have nurses who are pregnant," she said. But "our numbers were a bit bigger" this time around.
Lang was one of them. Her fourth child, Rhodes, was born March 12. He is her third son. "Boys run heavy in my family," she said. "And we're very boy-heavy in our unit."
Out of the 20 babies born this year to NICU nurses, only two are girls.
The bevy of women draw the usual jokes, Lang said, including "What's in the water? Don't drink the water," she recounted. Even the parents of the unit's tiny tenants began asking, "Is it a requirement to be pregnant to work here?" she said.
The sheer number of neonatal intensive care nurses having babies of their own prompted the hospital to gather all of the pregnant staffers, and the nurses who recently gave birth, along with their babies, for a group photo.
The image was posted on the hospital's Facebook page, where it drew hundreds of comments from appreciative parents whose sick infants were cared for in the Children's Mercy NICU.
"Congratulations, ladies," wrote one mother. "You helped take care of my little Tripp in April and we are forever thankful."
"Congrats to all those mamas who took amazing care of my baby for months!" posted another.
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