Santa Rosa's Kent Beasley, 59, a record-breaking father

Kent Beasley, 59, is celebrating his 42nd Father’s Day.

The first came in 1968, when he was a deer-in-the-headlights high school basketball player rushed into an emergency marriage and fatherhood at 18.

But the one most indelibly etched into his memory is Father’s Day 1992. That’s the day Jeff and Carleigh were born — tiny, 3-pound test-tube-assisted miracles whose arrival nine weeks ahead of schedule marked for Beasley the beginning of a second round of fatherhood with a brand-new family.

What he could never have anticipated on that joyous day 17 years ago, when he became a dad again at the mature age of 42, was Laina. She existed then only as a two-celled embryo that would wait 13 years in frozen suspension for her chance at joining the brood.

When Kent’s wife, Debi, gave birth to their youngest in 2005, the baby was one for the record books, heralded in press reports around the world as the longest medically documented case of a frozen embryo that resulted in a healthy baby.

For Kent Beasley, Laina is so much more.

He admits she is a child he was reluctant to have because of his age — 55 at the time. Her birth effectively extends his active parenting to 73, an age he doesn’t even want to contemplate. When she graduates from high school in 14 years, Beasley will have spent 55 unbroken years raising children. In addition to the twins, his offspring include his daughter Michelle, now 41; son Seth, 33; and Debi’s biological daughter Danielle, 24, who Kent adopted when she was an infant. He also has six grandsons.

The truth is, Laina’s curly-headed charms have completely captivated him and the entire blended Beasley bunch.

“I worry that I won’t have the things to keep everybody going,” said the retired probation officer, who three years ago took up an encore career as a clerk in the downtown Santa Rosa post office at a time when his friends were getting ready to retire for good.

“You always worry about that, especially when you’re an older father. Will I be able to continue working and keep everything running? But once we had Laina, there was no turning back. And she’s a blast to have around.”

That fact is abundantly clear in the Beasleys’ home in a modest subdivision off Santa Rosa’s Brush Creek Road. The living and dining rooms are so consumed with toys and tot-sized furniture that you might mistake the house for a day-care center.

But it’s all for Laina, from the baby-doll crib to the child-sized vanity, to the miniature stroller and stove.

“I could not imagine life without her — at all,” said Danielle, who initially opposed the pregnancy out of fear for her mother’s health, a fear so great she moved out of the house for several weeks in protest.

“I love her so much and I’m so glad she’s here and my mom made the decision to have her,” she says now. “If I’m having a bad day, her smile and the sincere and precious joy that you only get to see in little kids — well, I get that every day from her.”

Kent concedes that Debi, 49, initially managed to convince him to use the last of the eggs they had banked so many years earlier to try for another baby only because the odds of her actually getting pregnant seemed so slim.

When the Beasley’s embryos were frozen, the success rate for in-vitro fertilization was only 15 percent to 20 percent, said Charles Cornwell, the embryologist who thawed and cultured their remaining embryos, finding one that looked promising. The last time he saw Laina, he said, she was about “135 microns in diameter, a little smaller than a grain of sand.”

Although the success rate has now climbed to 35 percent to 50 percent, he added, Laina was frozen under the old technology and thus faced the greater odds.

“The hard part for Kent was that he’d been a father since he was 18,” says Debi, a slim blonde with a quick laugh, a natural optimism and a deep need to mother that goes back to her early childhood. “He thought he’d like some time for us, just he and I, to spend together. To start all over again? That’s a huge commitment.”

A former neonatal nurse, Debi was 45 at the time. And she had suffered numerous health problems after suffering a near-fatal allergic reaction to a fertility drug taken during a previous attempt to become pregnant with their remaining embryos in 1997.

But Debi was driven by another concern — a sense of responsibility toward the eggs still preserved in liquid nitrogen.

The Beasleys were among scores of couples caught up in a notorious fertility clinic scandal in 1995. They were dismayed to learn that that their fertility doctor at UC Irvine, Ricardo Asch, and his colleagues had taken eggs and embryos from patients without their permission, and implanted them in other women, or donated them to research.

The couple was able to retrieve a half dozen of their embryos from Cornell University, where they had been sent for experiments. Debi, who has a strong Christian faith, agonized over the idea that those still-living cells were out there, with an unknown fate, and felt compelled to reach as she put it, some “closure.”

“We lost four embryos,” she laments, “never to know what happened . . . Had my doctors told me ‘you are not or never will be healthy enough to go through with this,’ I would have donated them versus destroying them or just leaving them there.”

Kent says he was scared.

“We had pretty strong beliefs and we had been trying to come to terms with it and what we’ve got to do to make it right. It was pretty unsettling after all we’d been through. But I could tell with Debi there really wasn’t any other way around it. It just wasn’t going to set for her to say we’re all done and we’re going to leave those embryos frozen forever.”

Debi spent a year getting into shape with everything from prenatal massages and vitamins to walks in the woods and finally got the OK from her physicians.

The twins, then 12, were a bit flummoxed by their mom’s announcement that she was going to give birth to what amounts to their triplet, harvested at the same time in 1991.

“I just think I was more shocked and surprised than anything,” laughs Carleigh, a student at Rincon Valley Christian School.

Carleigh and Jeff were GIFT (gamete intrafallopian transfer) babies, fertilized in their mother’s fallopian tubes. Laina was fertilized in a Petri dish, frozen and then transferred to her mother’s uterus.

Laina was born robust, four weeks early but weighing in at more than six pounds. Her birth attracted international curiosity and landed the Beasleys in the spotlight, including an interview on “The Today Show.” Cornwell said he has since read in the medical journal Human Reproduction of a baby born two years ago from an embryo frozen for 14 years.

Three studies presented at a conference of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in San Francisco last fall suggested that frozen embryo babies actually are less likely to be premature and underweight than babies born from fresh eggs.

Any initial misgivings by Kent have given way to a daddy’s indulgence and devotion. He routinely takes Laina out for Saturday morning breakfast dates and ice cream at Coldstone after swimming at the Y. He reads to her and isn’t above playing dolls, giving them silly names that make her giggle.

With all those years of experience, he takes parenting in stride, and according to his kids, excels at it.

“He’s amazing. He is not my biological dad, but I met him when I was 3 months old. Since that day he has been a dad to me,” said Danielle, who works in a paralegal firm. She remembers him doing everything from putting her hair up in ponytails to caring for her when she got pneumonia and taking her on camping trips.

“He taught me how to fish,” she says. “He sang me Beatles songs when I couldn’t sleep.” In junior high she put her feelings into words with a poem she called, “My Father’s Hands.”

“It was something like his hands are calloused and rough because they’re the hands of a father. And how he plays basketball and goes to work, but when he comes home he has a soft touch to all his kids.”

He’s an athletic guy who backpacks, plays basketball, skis and does distance running and bicycling. He works on cars. All guy. Last week he was nursing a knee hurt by doing a brutal “World’s Biggest Loser” workout.

But her dad is so sentimental, Carleigh teases, that a State Farm insurance commercial would move him to tears.

When the teen found what she thought was the perfect prom dress last year online — in a store in Sacramento — practical Debi declined to drive her up there. But not only did soft-touch Dad take her there, he sat patiently for an hour and a half watching her try on dresses until she found one.

His long experience as a dad over multiple generations has taught Kent to enjoy the little moments because before you know it, those babies are grown. And he doesn’t sweat the small stuff.

“Being an older parent,” he says, “your tolerance for what goes on — a skinned knee, a bruise — it’s just like no big deal.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.