The conjoined twins who were separated at Medical City Children's Hospital in Dallas have left the hospital for an inpatient rehabilitation center.
Owen and Emmett Ezell left the Dallas hospital eight months after their surgery and a day after turning 9-months-old. Video of their departure from Medical City Children's Hospital appears in the player above.
"I am so excited. I am shaking I am so excited. We have been waiting months for this and it's finally here," said the twins' mother Jenni Ezell, earlier this week.
Doctors hope that the boys can go home for good sometime this summer.
The boys were born in July and were connected from the chest to the belly button. They shared a liver and intestines until doctors at Medical City Dallas Hospital separated them a month later.
They've lived in the neonatal intensive care unit ever since and have each had multiple surgeries and setbacks. Through it all, the boys' parents never lost faith.
"Back when the struggles were the hardest and the struggles were the biggest, basically the way we would keep pressing on without losing it was to talk about having all four boys together," said the boys' father Dave Ezell. "When this is over, we're going to have 4 boys, we're going to be a family."
In the past the hospital had said the boys had to pass three major hurdles to go home -- eating and breathing on their own and fully healing from their surgical wounds.
The hospital said Monday the twins are breathing on their own through trachea breathing tubes and are no longer being fed through an IV, but they continue to be fed through tubes in their abdomens.
While at rehab, the boys' parents will learn to manage those tubes until the boys can eat on their own.
"It's been a dream. We've made it and it's been really hard. I feel like that first 9 months, it's all been emotional, it has been very difficult emotionally," said Jenni Ezell. "But from here out it's going to be very difficult physically. We are going to be exhausted taking care of these boys but it's going to be totally worth it!"
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Jenni and Dave Ezell call the twins their "little miracles" and say each step has been part of a greater plan.
"They wouldn't be here if it weren't for God. It's the truth," said Jenni Ezell.
To celebrate the twins' health and success, a small celebration is being planned on Wednesday prior to their departure. Ahead of that celebration, the hospital and Ezell family released new photographs of the now 9-month-old boys on Tuesday.
The family has been chronicling the boys' progress, since their separation surgery in August 2013 on The Ezell Twins blog.
The Ezells are selling T-shirts through their blog that read, "The Works of God Displayed in Them, John 9:1-3."
The funds donated go into a trust fund set up for Emmett and Owen and their direct care.
More: The Ezell Twins blog | The Ezell Twins T-Shirts | Contribute
