Four boys and five girls in Mali — the Guinness World Record-breaking nonuplets — celebrated a very important milestone this week: their first birthday.

Halima Cissé and husband Abdelkader Arby welcomed their nine babies in Morocco on May 4, 2021. Now the babies – are 30 weeks old and are still being cared for in the hospital they were born. Fortunately, they are all “in perfect health and stable development”.

Although he conceded that caring for nine newborns can be “tiresome at times,” he stated that everything is forgotten when the parents consider how blessed their children are in terms of health.

The couple are also parents to daughter Souda, 3.

“It’s not easy but it’s great,” he said.

Cissé, now 26, was transferred to a Moroccan clinic just before the birth of her children, according to Mali’s minister of health and social development, Dr. Fanta Siby. Doctors thought she was only expecting seven children at the time.

“So you can imagine our surprise when we discovered nine of them during the birth,” Casablanca Ain Borja Clinic’s Dr. Youssef Alaoui said during an interview with Today last year.

“Luckily this didn’t faze us, since we have one of the largest neonatal resuscitation services in Morocco,” added Alaoui. “Our teams were ready to welcome these children into the world and able to treat them in the best conditions.”

According to Guinness World Records, Cissé’s husband stayed behind in Mali to care for their eldest kid when the nonuplets arrived.

He was finally able to join his family in Mali later that year in October.

Guinness World Records stated on their birthday that the nonuplets had broken the record for the most children born at a single birth who survived.

The previous record was held by Nadya Suleman’s eight children, dubbed “Octomom.”

“Nonuplets are extremely rare, and until the arrival of the Cissé children, no cases had been recorded of nine babies from a single birth surviving for more than a few hours,” the record-keeping organization wrote, noting that the children continue to be under the care of the clinic so that their development can be monitored.

According to their father, the nonuplets’ milestone will be commemorated with a little party this weekend.

“Nothing is better than the first year,” he said. “We will remember this great moment we are going to experience.”