SANTA BARBARA — A 50-year-old Lompoc grandmother who received fertility treatments at a Northridge reproductive center delivered healthy quadruplets Thursday, apparently the oldest woman to have four children at once, hospital administrators said.

"We wanted a child to make our marriage complete," said beaming dad Robert Fillippini, a 49-year-old welder with the Lompoc Unified School District.

"To be blessed with four is just a miracle."

His wife, Cheryl Fillippini, a former neonatal ward nurse and recent law school graduate, gave birth to the babies--three girls and a boy--between 8:30 and 8:33 a.m. with the aid of 20 physicians and nurses, said Janet O'Neill, a spokeswoman for Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.

Robert, Rebekah, Amanda and Sydney were underweight and more than two months premature when they were delivered by caesarean section, according to O'Neill.

They will remain hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit, which has been affectionately renamed the "quad pod," until they gain weight and develop their lungs and sucking reflexes. Robert weighed 2 pounds, 1 ounce, Rebekah 3 pounds, 1 ounce, Amanda 3 pounds, 4 ounces and Sydney 2 pounds, 6 ounces.

The couple, who married three years ago and together have 10 children by previous marriages, confirmed they had sought fertility treatments twice in the past two years at the Greater Valley Center for Reproductive Medicine in Northridge. But at a news conference outside Cottage Hospital on Thursday, Robert Fillippini declined to comment on what method of in vitro fertilization they used.

"I'm not going to talk about that," he said. "But I will say our doctor was great."

Typically, the reproductive facility uses a procedure that removes a woman's eggs and fertilizes them in a dish before injecting them into the upper uterus, according to the center's director Dr. Gary D. Hubert. "It takes three weeks from start to finish," he said.

Hubert said his facility has a 50% per-try pregnancy rate and provides two additional attempts free if the first try is unsuccessful. But he added: "It can get expensive."

Certainly, that will be the case with the quads' birth. Hospital officials estimate the bill for bed space and obstetrics, not including the delivery of the infants, could top $400,000. And that's if there are no complications.