Karen and Scott Guthrie were told they were more likely to win the lottery than have identical triplets. But little Liam, Nash and Kobi have proven they are one lucky couple.
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There was no history of multiple births in their family and the babies were conceived naturally, without the help of IVF.
''You sort of look at them each night and [think] how did we get this?'' Mrs Guthrie said, with a laugh.
Identical triplets are definitely rare. No one seems to have defined the odds but they are variously put at at one in 500,000 births, one in one million births - even one in 200 million births.
But it seems Canberra Hospital has had more than its fair share, with two sets of identical triplets born there in the last 15 months.
The Guthrie boys were born on April 2 this year following the birth on January 6 last year of another set of identical triplets - the Thayer boys of Calwell.
The hospital's Newborn Intensive Care Unit director Zsuzsoka Kecskes said within Canberra there were 6000 deliveries a year and triplets generally would be born about twice a year, most of them not identical.
''So it is a really, really rare occurrence,'' Dr Kecskes said.
The Guthries say they have been treated like celebrities in their home town of Bombala in southern NSW, where the triplets have caused a bit of a sensation and helpfully boosted the local population.
They were believed to be the first triplets in the area, but a local resident scoured the births register to find triplets were born in 1858 in nearby Native Dog Creek to a couple who already had 13 children.
The Guthries are not quite there, with three older children - Thomas, 15, Kayla, 13, and River, four.
''Scott wanted a fourth child but we got four, five and six instead,'' Mrs Guthrie, 36, said, laughing.
The boys are now 11 weeks old and the family is shouldering the load on its own. The older children are a great help, with Thomas taking on some feeding and bathing duties.
Mr Guthrie is on two months' carer's leave from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, where he is a senior field officer in the Kosciuszko National Park. He reckons life is simply ''surreal''.
His wife agreed. ''It is scary with all the stresses we had to go through with the pregnancy, but it's been a blessing at the same time.''
Mrs Guthrie, a finance officer with the local council, had two miscarriages before the triplets were born at just over 31 weeks by caesarean section - Nash weighing 1.74 kilograms, Kobi 1.5 kilograms and Liam 1.56 kilograms.
''Liam's the mummy's boy. He screams and screams until mum picks him up and then he smiles and stops crying. Nash - the big boy - is the quietest and most laid-back and more affectionate with the other two … Kobi is a little bit in between,'' Mrs Guthrie said.
The boys were born healthy but Liam and Kobi later developed hernias. Little Liam also caught an infection and the family almost lost him. They have great praise for the staff of both the Canberra Hospital and Calvary Hospital, where the boys were transferred while they waited to have their hernia operations.
Dr Kecskes said babies going home was always a milestone but the unit followed the health and development of all premature babies until they turned three.
