Now, We REALLY Have Triplets

Well, we're about a week and a half in to REALLY having triplets.  Izzy came home on 12/19 and our lives will truly never be the same.  It's been an incredible 10 days (yes, I'm counting days at this point).  Everything that I thought about how life would be with three, got blown out of the water the day after Izzy came home.  We've basically gone from playing man-to-man to needing to play a zone defense.  I've tried to explain it to people, but it's an experience that can never truly be explained to its fullness or understood in its entirety by folks who don't have triplets.

Our departure from the NICU last week was pretty uneventful.  After a four month stay, I thought I might be a little more emotional.  To be honest, we were ready to leave and not come back.  We'll surely miss all of our nurses and doctors and will be forever thankful for the care and love they gave our daughters, but I won't miss having one of my babies at the hospital with the other two at home.  We've been trying to ween ourselves off of the care that the NICU provided and have only called back a handful of times for help with some of the inevitable questions we've had.  It doesn't matter who answers the phone, they're always willing to help and ask for updates on how all of the girls are doing.  Even our favorite nurse, now friend, Melissa, came by last week and spent several hours just holding the girls.  I can see how they might get attached :)  We love it!

Izzy, buckled in and ready to get home and see her sisters!


Meg and our smallest girl



Happy to be leaving the hospital




Meg, glued to her baby.  Wait, if I'm taking this photo, who's driving?




Saying that we are utterly exhausted would still be a huge understatement.  Everyone says that "it gets easier."  I sure as hell hope so.  We're running at an unsustainable pace, and that's with help!  Don't worry about us though.  We'll get through it.  We're already adjusting to even less sleep and we're really trying to be diligent when it comes to keeping the girls on a schedule.  They're adjusting, too, which makes this transition much more manageable.

We're learning on the fly and adjusting our behavior based on how our girls respond.  They're pretty good at letting us know when they've had too much to eat, when they're getting bored, and when they just need to be held for a while.  I'm not sure how aware of each other they are yet, but I definitely think they use crying as a way to communicate with each other.  If they're even semi-awake and one starts crying, the other two easily chime in, even to the point where it sounds like they're singing the same tune.  Even though it's extremely loud, it's hard for Meg and me not to look at each other and smile :)

Bottle washing and formula mixing absolutely take up too much of our time.  I don't see us getting away from it anytime soon though, so we're just trying to get faster.  What's really time consuming is calculating everything that you need for the next day.  All of the girls are on different formula.  The breast milk-to-formula ratio is different for each girl.  Plus, they're all on a slightly different calorie make up.  Add to that the fact that their volume requirements seem like they're constantly in flux.  If you're not good at mental math, forget it, your toast!  So, it's probably a good thing that I'm doing the bottles (sorry babe).

Let's see.  What else has been really exciting this week?  Oh yeah, Izzy pulled out her NG tube three times on Christmas night, Maddy has been extremely constipated, and we're trying to switch Sophie from sleeping on her stomach to her back (not fun).

Believe it or not, I've been working on this post for five days.  I just can't seem to get enough time to put a complete thought together and write in a way that flows.  I'm sure I've complained about this before.  So, if I don't hit "Publish" now, you may never see this post!  There's definitely more to come!

Sisters, Sophia and Isabelle, spending some quality time together for the first time!


Meg, Sophia, and Izzy



Izzy, looking almost exactly like Sophia


Izzy, practicing her bottle feeding



Izzy, assuming the post-feeding, sleeping position


Sophia, lounging with all of her baby chub.  I never thought our babies would be "chubby."


Dad, with Sophia and Isabelle



Izzy's first bath!  Well, her first at home at least.  She and the other girls are so close to sucking their thumb.


"Mom, get this big frog off of me!"



Santa brought Wubbanub's for all of the girls.  Izzy loves her pink puppy pacifier.


Maddy, spending some quality time with Kelly


Triple-wide!  That's how we roll!


Can you tell, in order, who's been crying the longest?  HINT:  Let the color on the face be your guide


Aaaaah, a nice photo, with no crying, of all the girls


Izzy was a littttttle hungry and accidentally mistook Maddy's cheek for a nipple.  Yum Yum.  Look at her eyes!  Cracks me up every time!


Keegan and Kelly spending some time with Sophia



Grandma Jo Anne working her magic with Maddy


Mom and Izzy



If you've put in a full day's work, your shirt will probably look like this at the DeBauche household.


I love this photo!  Maddy, with her Wubbanub.  She has the biggest eyes when she's not crying.

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.

Forgot To Post The Bath Video!

Now, this video is truly cute, but it's also six minutes long.  We're not bathing experts by any means, but Meg seems to have it down cold.  So, I thought I'd share it in case anyone needed a quick video lesson.  The few crying parts are pretty funny, mostly because it's now something between a realy baby cry and cat that just had its tailed stepped on :)