Father faints after learning that he and wife are having triplets

They say they're now excited to expand their family

The family will expand to six children (Facebook)

A father says he fainted when his wife surprised him with some special news: They’re going to have triplets.

Robert Tolbert said that his wife, Nia, left him a gift bag and a handwritten note. Mr Tolbert figured, ‘Hey, it’s probably that FitBit I’ve been hinting at getting for a while now.” But he was dead wrong.

“I opened the bag and I saw a very, very long sonogram,” Mr Tolbert told ABC News. “Then I saw three onesies in the bag… and they were numbered one, two, and three.”

Mr Tolbert, who already has three children with his wife, says he “fainted” when he finally understood the message.

“I was just shocked,” he said. “I just went straight to bed.”

The couple says that they’ve now recovered from the shock of learning they’ll double the number of children, and are now excited to expand their family.

“We’re already planning for our new household. It’s going to be equally balanced now — with three little girls and three little boys,” Ms Tolbert said.

“But we’re not too concerned,” she continued. “I know we’re not going to sleep for a couple of years, our grocery bill is going to go up, and our house is not going to be quiet and that’s OK.”

Triplet births are pretty rare in the United States. While there were just under four million live births in 2015, just 4,123 of those were triplet births. Twins make up a slightly larger slice of the pie, with 133,155 of the births that same year.

Just 228 quintuplets were born in 2015, while just 24 families experienced an expansion amounting to five or more babies at once that year.