Nana Comes For Christmas '12

As Christmas grows near, so do the guests that come to shower our girls with kisses...and that's a good thing!  It's good for a couple of reasons.

Primarily, it's great that we're able to capture so many memories of the girls with their friends and family.  I'm sure your parents told you what kind of things you were doing when you were one, well, if they remember.   Surely you don't, do you?  These little ladies will form memories when they get old from looking at these photos and reading these stories.  After a while, they'll even try to figure out if what they're remembering is based on an actual memory or if it's just from these photos.  Funny how that works.

The second, and most important, reason is because we don't have to drive anywhere!  For years, without kids, we were the ones that had to travel for every holiday.  Now, everyone comes to us!  This doesn't mean we won't take trips in the future, it just means that, for now, we can enjoy these holidays with memories filled with family and not the crazy trips that typically accompany getting to see your family.  Though, some would argue those memories are just as important.  Those "some" probably don't have triplets however.  We'll get there.  Just not yet :)

Last weekend, my mom (aka Nana) came to visit on her way to Virginia from Oregon.  She stayed for a few days to fill up her triplet tank until she comes back our way again.  She was just here a few months ago, but the girls have grown leaps and bounds since then.  As I'm sure she would attest, it was a completely different visit.

Sophie likes giving kisses now.  A little too freely actually.


Izzy, smiling with Nana


Maddy, getting in a giggle or two


Is she pushing down or pulling up?  You make the call. (hint: look at her face)






Our pretty little lady


Izzy's starting to stick up for herself a little more.  We've been letting the girls "work things out" when they both want the same toy and Sophie, being a little bigger, would usually out-muscle one of the other girls.  Well, not so fast my friend.  Izzy's using her booty to stake her claim and Sophie doesn't like it one bit.



Nana and Sophie working on blowing kisses


Maddy, working on the xylophone


So, I thought someone just forgot to wipe the sweet potato dinner off of Maddy's face.  Alas, we found out that we're feeding Maddy too much "orange stuff" and it's turning her skin orange!  Go figure.



Maddy, excited to see Meg, lunges in for a kiss and hug (no, that's not a straw coming out of her glass)


Yes, there are gates in almost every pic with the girls




Saying their goodbyes...

Visiting Is Only For The Brave

No long post tonight, just wanted to share some memories of recent visitors.  It takes a lot of courage to come in to a house full of triplets, but for the few that do, the memories are oh so rewarding, with the biggest reward being that you'll probably end up on this blog :)

Felicia (left), our friend Melissa's daughter, is heading back to school, but not before having helped us out for almost the entire summer!  Corrine, her friend, is stepping up to help.



My mom (aka "nana"), came to see us when Meg was away for the weekend.  She lives in Oregon, so every minute with the girls is special.





A few weeks earlier, my dad was in town.  He's not much of "facetimer" or "skyper," so he thoroughly enjoyed spending time with his granddaughters.



Grandpa and Sophie, deep in conversation


"Who is this guy?"


"Oh wait, it's grandpa.  Life is good."


Sophie, figuring out how to get in to the bins.  She does this regularly now, but this was a couple of months ago.










Our friend, Kristi, stopped by for a few days.  She left her husband and her own girls back in VA to come meet our little ladies.

Typically, I only show the "best" images when I post, which usually come as the result of whittling down a large amount of photos to just a few.  Every once in a while, the discards are just as good as the winners and it's worth showing how many "bad" images you have to take sometimes to get one "good" one.















Let's go way back to last summer.  When Meg wrapped up school and moved to Illinois, we took a "Marvelous Multiples" class at the hospital to help prepare for our girls.  While taking the class, we met Rachael and her husband, Gib.  A few weeks after our girls were born, we ran in to them in the NICU, as they gave birth to their two girls, Brynn and Anya.  Well, after waiting out RSV season, another surgery, and just overall busyness, Rachael brought her girls over for a playdate.

Brynn was loving the camera.  I think she would've eaten it if I would have let her.




Brynn and Sophie


Maddy, Brynn, Izzy, and Sophie


After Anya woke up from her catnap, we took all of the girls for a walk.

Anya and Brynn


That's a lot of ladies!

Bathtime Surprise

We're starting to settle in...a little.   We're finding ways to get more sleep, mostly because we're trying to divide up the time so everyone isn't up all of the time.  Having my mother here the last few days has been a great help.  I took her to the NICU so the nurses could show her how to feed the girls since we haven't perfected the technique yet.  If you looked at the burp cloth after a feeding, some might actually think I was intentionally trying to feed the burp cloth instead of Sophia.  I'm not sure how so much of it ends up coming out the sides of her mouth, but the nurses do a much better job, so I thought they should show my mom the "right" way.

My mom has been tremendously helpful with meals and with bottle preparation and clean-up.  She's also taken over some of the transitional shift times like early in the morning, when Meg needs to catch-up on the sleep she missed at night and when I need to get ready for work.  She's also staying up a little later to give Meg a few hours to sleep on the front-end of the night shift.

My mom with Sophia


Eventually, we're going to get our girl to sleep at night and be awake during the day, but the NICU is kind of like a casino--there's constant stimulation and you have no sense of day and night--so, she's mistakenly got them turned upside down and doesn't yet understand that babies (parents) need to sleep between 11:00pm and 5:00am.  She'll get there though.

Over the last couple of months, the NICU has been giving the girls a bath on Saturdays and Tuesdays.  We took advantage of the coaching and started doing it ourselves a while back. It was our turn to try it at home.  Wow, did we fail miserably!  Our biggest lessons learned were:

1. Leaning over the normal bathtub to reach in to the baby bathtub and give a bath, kills your knees, even with a towel.
2. There's not enough room for two people to kneel next to the bathtub in the girls' bathroom without straddling the toilet from the ground with your legs (not cool when it's you that's doing the straddling).
3. Giving her a bath in the NICU was much easier than doing it at home.
4. Babies will not hesitate to poop in the water (I mistakenly thought they just peed in the water).
5. We need to try harder and be more prepared.
6. Babies will not hesitate to poop in the drying towel.
7. Babies will not hesitate to poop in the SECOND drying towel.
8. They look adorable when they're super clean.
9. You can give a 37-weeker a mini-mohawk when her hair is still wet.

 Well, maybe we didn't fail.  Heck, she's still alive isn't she!

Sophia, with a " Who, me?" look on her face after dirtying up the tub and two towels


One of the issues we're struggling with is how much tummy time we give her.  She definitely seems to be struggling with gas/poop and is much more irritated when we have her flat on her back or slightly inclined in the bouncy chair.  Our pediatrician told us it has to do with preemies at this age not being able to release their butt cheeks when they're trying to pass gas.  Apparently, they don't know that you need to let the cheeks go to let if flow.  She gets super tense and actually holds everything inside.  She'll learn. 

We noticed when giving her some tummy time, that she seems way more comfortable.  Maybe it's because her butt is up in the air and the gas is rising to the highest point to get out.  Whatever the reason, she loves it.  The dilemma we have now is that the NICU told us that they're too old to sleep on their stomach.  When they were younger, ~32-35 weeks, the nurses put them on their stomach to help with the reflux that both Maddy and Sophie were having.  There's a big campaign led by the NICHD called "Back to Sleep," which is meant to remind parents that you can reduce the risk of SIDS by placing healthy babies on their backs to sleep, not on their stomachs.  It's just our luck that our babies stay up all of the time when they're on their backs and really only seem to get restful sleep when they're on their stomachs.

So, Meg and I are going back and forth, weighing the risk of letting them sleep on their stomachs with the risk of them not growing because their not getting any real rest.  For the last day and a half, we've been putting Sophia on her stomach when we're awake and someone is watching her.  At night, she stays on her back and no one gets any sleep.  Meg took Sophia to her first visit with our new pediatrician yesterday and both the nurse and our doctor said that it was all right to use a movement monitor called Angelcare to safely allow her to sleep on her stomach and give us peace of mind.  I'm going to do a little more research before I feel comfortable enough to actually try it, but if it really does work, I may get my wife back!

Meg, "watching" Sophia in the morning.  The best moms can see with their eyes closed :)


The nurses decided to try and ween Maddy off of her last little bit of oxygen yesterday. When we called in to the NICU later in the evening, she was still handling it just fine. Meg is going to visit with Izzy and Maddy a little later this afternoon and, if Maddy is still off of the oxygen, they'll probably start talking about a plan to bring her home within a few days.  She's been episode free for quite some time, so there's nothing else stopping her at this point. Then we'll have TWO babies at home, possibly by Friday!

Dr. Liu called us yesterday to talk about next steps with Izzy.  Right now, she weighs 3 lbs 8 oz.  Ideally, he'd like her to be around five pounds before re-connecting her intestines, but if she a) starts dumping again or b) starts having trouble with her liver, he'll do the surgery sooner, but really wants her, at the bare minimum, to be at least two kilos or ~4 lbs 6 oz.  Also, the surgeon and our NICU docs really want to ween her off of her oxygen a little more before performing the surgery.  Lastly, they still need to do a one-day analysis on the bottom section of intestine, between the mucus fistula and the rectum, to make sure that the three perforations that were allowed to heal have all done so.

I can't help but look at these girls everyday and think about how close we came to losing them and where we would or wouldn't be right now if we had listened to the doctor at CHOP who told us our girls were too sick to save.  Honestly, it infuriates me, so I try not to think about it too often.  I just hope that other families don't lose their babies because they're not confident enough to go with their gut and get a second opinion.  I'll get off of my soapbox now, it just amazes me every time I look at them and reflect on how far we've come.  We are truly blessed.