Day in and out

I didn't know how to follow up after the last entry, so I let this sit for way too long. Let me give an update about day to day life with triplets at 21 months. I say day to day, but to be honest my only day long experience with them is on the weekend. On the weekdays I still go to work and see them only about 3 hours total each day. This is plenty for me, but sometimes I feel a little guilty that I don't get as much interaction with them as Sharry or Roberta does. Norma, Sharry's mom, was here for a few months after my dad died to help take care while I was in California and then stayed because she loves spending time with the grandkids.

So, the day to day operations that make up triplet raising: We wake up at around 7 with 1 or more kids talking and yelling in their cribs. Ryan has taken off his clothes during the night only once so far, and Justin does hate clothes and if he can he will remove his pants. Snaps are fairly awesome on clothes to me. But for the most part how we left them is how we'll find them.

So, bouncing energetic kids. Up the stairs they climb, with varying stops along the way to pick up something and examine it. They love to chuck things down the stairs during the day so usually there is plenty to look at. Sometimes Justin points out shoes by the front door and checks with me that we are still calling them "shoes" by yelling loudly "SHOOS". The procession up the stairs is kind of complicated, as we trade off who we're watching after as someone decides that the piece of lint they found is so interesting they need to sit on the stairs and examine it. Sharry and I should bet on who makes it up first. There's definitely strong candidates, but it's usually a nice mix.

While Norma was here, she would greet the kids when they woke up and let Sharry and I sleep a few extra minutes. While she was doing that, the alarm was set to a ridiculous leisurely time of 7:40am. But the real work of changing all the kids from pajamas into clothes and change their diapers from overnight. Sharry and I do it different, bringing the kids up and then changing them up here.

The kids know breakfast as "nanny" since we give them a banana everyday with something else for breakfast. So cries of "nanny nanny" go through the house as I get out a banana and peel it. By the time I've gotten the banana out though, the kids have dispersed through the house and are quite reluctant to actually eat it. Eating in general is hands down the most frustrating time for both Sharry and I. One day they'll eat pancakes like they are ambrosia, and the next day they will throw it on the ground untasted while screaming at the top of their lungs. Since we've always been so worried about them gaining weight we would beg, plead, threaten, cajole, and even make new things if this happened. The doctor just gave us the buy off on the "go hungry then" plan of attack. Starting nowish, we are going to give them their meal and if they eat nothing, then they get nothing to eat. The theory is they will (hopefully quickly) learn that what we make for them is all. No more catering to their whims. They kind of back each other up a bit too. If one doesn't eat and is acting the fool, the others will have a much higher chance of throwing food and yelling too. The wall behind the kids can look like the beginnings of a Jackson Pollock painting after the day is through, in vibrant food color.

Alright, so breakfast is hopefully eaten and now it's all of 8:30 am. Lunch time is 11, and we've got some time to fill. Usually someone has made coffee while the other one feeds the kids, which means that now it's breakfast time for the adults. So, we throw some coffee and cereal into us and ponder what to do with the rest of the morning. The kids are almost certainly clamoring for songs by yelling "ooo WA, ooo WA". This comes from a particular kids song that they seem to love more than any other. Even Ethan, who has an incredibly limited vocabularly knows how to say "ooo WA" awesome.

Sometimes we go on walks in the morning time, but given the weather around here, it's not that common. The kids have just started to learn how to play with each other and things in general without the parents having to drive, but they descend into "Lord of the Flies" mode pretty quick. I am really tempted to get some leashes or something, since the kids really want to walk around rather than being pushed around in a stroller. However, I can't count on them staying nearby and since there are two of us vs. three of them I can't let them loose.

So some kind of diversion for them until lunchtime. Hopefully something I feel is developing to their brain but I cop to letting them veg out in front of TV sometimes. Nick Jr. to the rescue. This post has gone on too long, so I'm going to post and hope to finish the rest of the day out later. This is probably pretty mundane stuff, but I can't remember what the routine was a year ago. Records are nice.

Code breaking and my dad

When I was about 10 or 11, I read all the time. The library was about a 15 minute walk from my house and I practically lived there in the summer time. They had an Apple IIe which I played with as much as I could get away with and a vast collection of books that let me explore any topic I liked. Kind of like the internet is now, but in card catalog form.

I started reading about ciphers and encryption and how that just set my imagination roaring. I told my dad that I thought it was cool and he decided to play a game with me. He made up a code, encoded a message and gave me the coded message. I wasn't good enough to break the code, which I remember being a simple substitution cipher for reasons I'll get to presently. But it wasn't any trivial alphabet jumble. To make it especially fun (for him or me I'll never know) each letter was represented by a little pictogram. I toyed with it for a little while but got nowhere, especially as he didn't give me any spacing to work with, and I think the theory was a little much for me to grasp.

We let the matter drop for a while, I think at least a few months past before I made an interesting discovery. While I was home after school I was looking at some knick knacks over the fireplace and I saw a scrap of paper tucked into this brass cup we had on display. I took it out of the cup and opened it up to discover what had to be the key to the cipher. As my eyes grew large and I was thinking something along the lines of "Eureka!" my dad came into the living room. With a shout of surprise he stepped forward quickly, grabbed the paper out of my hand and popped it into his mouth. With a victorious grin he swallowed and any hopes of me figuring out what the message said faded. He never told me what he had written down, and a few years later he had even forgotten the whole thing had happened. I think it's really funny sometimes the things that crystalize in your memory that define a person, and they don't even remember it happening.

Remembering My Dad

I wanted to write down some things I remember about my dad.

When I was younger, I was terrified of roller coasters. My grandpa would take my family to Knott's Berry Farm every year or so, but I think he did it just for the chicken dinner at the end of the day. That, and it was dinner with family and he liked that. Anyways, I would always shy away from the fast and looping rides and stick with more tame things. One time we were there, I was about 9 I would guess, the adults in the group were lining up to go on the Corkscrew. It was a small ride with three loops in it and you were done. My dad volunteered to wait with me while everyone else went on the ride and as they were getting ready to start moving he hunkered down and told me that I should time it. I had a watch that was a prized possession and loved to time things. From start to finish, the ride took 20 seconds flat. He told me that for such a short amount of time I could be brave and I could find out if I liked roller coasters or not. This convinced me for some reason and we walked on to the ride and rode it. I now love roller coasters, and I am happy that my dad convinced me to be brave for 20 seconds that one day.

When I was a kid, I was really picky about my food. I didn't like a lot of different vegetables, and my dad was a big omnivore and liked to cook kind of elaborate things when he did cook. He did encourage me to try different foods but was really pretty cool with me not eating something because I didn't like it. We didn't have a lot growing up, so if you didn't eat what was there you didn't eat (maybe snacking on a apple or something instead) but that was ok. This one time he made breakfast food for dinner, and I don't think we had a lot of stuff in the house because he really was pushing for me to eat this egg and mushroom scramble thing that he had made. He kept saying that I had to at least try it before I could leave the table. I was really miserable, since I hate mushrooms (to this day). I got so worked up and upset that when I finally tried to eat a bite to get out of dinner I threw up onto my plate! He never said anything about it afterwards and I remember him being cool about it. My dad was usually pretty cool under fire (or in this case sickness).

I was thinking about the botched dinner attempt because after I left home my dad really got into cooking in a big way. My brothers are a lot younger than me, so they had a different family dynamic for a few years after I left and my dad often remembered this when asked to recall what our (his kids) childhood was like. When I came back from Germany my dad was all of a sudden (at least to me) whipping up full on Chinese food feasts and crazy elaborate turkey dinners. But to me, although all this food was really good the thing I loved more than anything was the bread he'd make from scratch. I don't remember that happening as a kid, so I don't know when he started doing it, but by the time I started visiting home in the aughts fresh baked bread was one of the best things my dad made. When I took the clan down to tear up the two grandparents' homes, I took a little time out to ask my dad how he made such good bread and he showed me what he did. I hope I don't forget it, and I'm able to replicate it because it was such a good thing that I'd like to give to my kids as they grow up.

As I think of some more things, I'll probably be posting them here.

School of Hard Knocks

Man, kids learn stuff the really hard way. Right around their first birthday, both Ethan and Justin decided that if they tried really hard they could fall in a controlled way forward and be caught by a caring adult. We call it taking a first step, but it was very unlikely really controlled motion. I can't really imagine the trust that this involves from them, and I often this trust is misplaced. Especially given that the caretakers are almost always outnumbered by children to watch, this means there is the constant *THUD* sound followed by a pause and then wailing and crying over the latest encounter with the floor.

I'm sure every parent sees the same thing and goes throught this same horrible sense that they have to let their kids learn by knocking themselves around but it's so sad a pitiful. I'm glad they have the will (or lack of good sense) to keep trying. Ethan and Justin both have progressed to the point that they can take a few steps and most often don't fall on anything but their butt if they go too far. Ryan's taken a step at most, but seems to be very content with crawling about. He collapses in a heap if you try and get him to walk on his own.

Standing tall! Well, not yet.

Well, people warned me that once they started to crawl around I wouldn't have a spare moment and they were right. After a couple of weeks of begging Justin to figure it out, he joined his brothers in the mobile class of infants. This was end of June/early July I think and now he's quite speedy. Ethan and Justin both crawl like you would imagine babies do, on all fours in a blur of bounding motion, sometimes falling on their faces. When they do fall, they kind of incorporate that awkward stumble into the gait and kind of treat their face as an extra hand or knee.

Ryan's crawl is a different animal altogether. He never learned how to crawl on all fours an instead drags his body along in a kind of swimming pattern. He's about as fast as his brothers, but I think the crawlers win. I'm not sure Sharry will let me race them, we'll have to see. I think if done right it would either be an internet sensation or get them taken away. Maybe both. The line I should consider as uncrossable is inviting people to bet on them like horses I think.

Within days of learning to actually crawl, each one quickly learned that if they grab hold of something and pull they can stand up. Since we keep them in fairly isolated areas this didn't cause as much of a headache as you would think. Although babies do seem hard-wired to reach for things just on the edge of what they can have. They seem to plow right by the mounds of toys and things we have for them and stand up and reach as far outside the bars of their pen as possible to grab or destroy anything they can get a hold of. I guess it's the exploring nature of the baby, but that has been the most troublesome thing for us so far I think. They can be very quick (Ryan especially) and hone in on things that we've tried to put out of their reach and they work incessantly to get at it. We actually rearranged our entire living room because no matter how hard we tried Ryan would not stop pulling and chewing on the curtains.

Things are falling into a much more regular pattern around the house though. The boys all eat three "meals" a day and have about 4-5 bottles a day. 2 naps and 11ish hours of sleep at night. Sharry and I are both night owls but seem to handle 6-7am wake ups much better than we used to. I think I've resigned myself to never sleeping in again. Our main problem with the weekends when we do get to spend time with the kids is how to fill it. They still can't play with us much and we try to fill the 30-45 minute snatches of time between drinking and eating with crawling around time. We've started this week letting them crawl around the living room a bit (supervised of course) even though we can't stand the thought of what's on the floor.

I'm rambling a bit, so I'll stop. Sharry even now is looking at pictures from when they first came home and sighing about how grown up they are. They were little fragile treasures, but I won't ever forget the work that was put into them. I want to establish for the record what's going on around the house these days so in a few years I can try to remember what it was like having babies in the house. Hopefully, diapers will be a distant memory. Washing bottles, feeding resistant babies sloppy food, and changing diapers are not fun. I thought the days of projectile vomiting was over, but Ethan revived the grand tradition yesterday and I was the lucky one feeding him. So when we are looking back fondly on our little babies and wondering why they had to grow up, we need to remember these times too.

Mobile strike force

Ethan has learned to actually crawl. A few days ago (monday, for the record) Sharry and I saw him for the first time ditch his little worm like movements and start using his legs and arms to crawl around in a useful manner. Pants seem to really slow him down when he does this, but give him just a onesie and he's good to go. People have told me that I would look back on this new skill as the worst thing my baby ever learned to do. Given his propensity to bite, they might just be right. Coupled with this quick speed, Ethan has taken to really biting things and people just after arriving. I think he kind of uses it like a brake in a way, he comes crawling along and then as he is falling forward (cause he just isn't that good at it) he takes a healthy bite at anything nearby. He's startled both me and Sharry into giving him a little smack when that happens, as he has a lot of teeth and it's quite painful. In fact, he has actually drawn blood on poor Roberta.

Now before you go calling CPS, I do mean little smack, I don't think he even knows that it happened to be honest. I think jerking away from him while he's clamped down on you probably feels worse than the tap we give him. But I think it's instinct to swat at something biting you like a dog. It just surprised us both because we both have talked it over and don't really like the idea of spanking. But we never talked about smacking hands or anything. But now we have to figure out how to correct a baby that barely knows anything, but can really hurt people if we don't stop them. We have doctor visit pretty soon, I guess we can talk with her about how to stop a baby from biting you.

The will to jump

The kids are a bit over 8 months old now and the fast-paced experience of parenthood still overwhelms me all the time. Crawling is on the horizon and then I think we all will be in a world of hurt. I live in what's called (around here at least) a split level home. To me it's just a 2 story house, but whatever. I guess they want to define where your front door is. Anyways, the stairs and the fact that I have dogs means that no matter how clean I try to keep my house it's still always going to be dangerous to have free run of the house. God only knows what the dogs drag in and around the floor, and all three kids have a penchant for trying to eat the floor. I've definitely caught one of them licking it. We've constructed a play pen of sorts out of free standing fence in the living room and we put them in there when they want to roll around. We also let them play in our room since dogs don't go there and it's fairly clear of dangerous things.

Just because they don't crawl doesn't mean they don't get around. People who already have kids ask me if they are 'scooting', which seems to be the catch-all term for directed movement that isn't crawling. Ethan literally does the movement I last saw in 80's breakdancing videos called 'The Worm'. He gets up on all fours and then throws his body forward, landing on his chest and in one fluid motion then pops back up on all fours and launches himself forward again. It looks a bit jarring, but he seems happy enough. Ryan tends to do a low crawl kind of motion, pulling his lower body along with his freakishly strong arms and sometimes rolls his body along to get somewhere quick. I ain't pretty, but it works.

But the so called scooting isn't what they spend most of their energy doing. They have discovered jumping and love to do it. For christmas, they got a exer-saucer which is basically a sling you put your kid upright in and it rotates freely to give the baby access to various activities involving large chunky plastic bits. So far, my babies only way to really interact with these activities is to bend them and try and shove them in their mouth. It might be where Ryan got his crazy arm strength. Anyways, they took to picking up their feet and kicking down hard while in this thing which didn't look at all good for their knees and feet. So we bought them a bouncing version of the excer-saucer. It's exactly the same, but instead of being solidly mounted into the base, this version is suspended by elastic straps which allow the baby with the slightest of kicks to jump relatively high in the air. The kids all took to this immediately, and it makes a huge racket. To add to the noise factor, the bounching chair has motion activated sound that plays this tikki room sounding song for about 5 minutes if you brush against the thing. The babies love this so much that they never stop jumping. If you try and hold them, they want to jump on your lap as if you are a human version of the bouncing chair.

The upshot of this whole story is that these things are a huge mixed blessing. With 3 babies, you often want a few minutes to yourself and it's awesome when you can just plop them in this thing and they get entertained by it. But it seems to be training them to think that they should incessantly bounce like some kind of real-life tigger. I'm sure they'll grow out of it, but sometimes I have the stupid fear of them giving themselves shaken baby syndrome. But that's just new parent fear, and I must face it down!

A last couple of random observations...

Justin and Ryan have discovered that they are boys with all the equipment that this implies. Bath time can be quite disturbing as they seems quite oblivious to what their grasping mangling hands are yanking and scratching at. The parenting magazines all tell me this is normal, but it doesn't make it right.

A few weeks ago my babies all had some kind of colds for the first time in their short lives. They seemed to be handling it ok and then Ethan started puking anytime he drank more than 3 or 4 ounces (half his usual meal). Being covered in formula puke isn't one of the more fun things in life, but I just thought it was a gross part of parenthood and didn't think about any further ramifications of it. Namely, that my child is a human being that could harbor illness that I haven't had yet. Like a stomach flu that was causing him to have such an upset stomach. A couple days after Ethan started being sick I had my very first case (in concious memory at least) of the stomach flu. I've never been sick like that and now I hold a healthy amount of respect for the disease carrying rugrats that inhabit my house now.