Tripletville Adventures : Home Week 2 ~ A day in the life

A day in the life of a triplet family
Many people seem to be curious about the amount of different items we go through in a day/week so I thought I'd share that to begin this week's blog with, just to give you an idea what a day in our lives looks like now. So we feed the babies every 4 hours or just about; there is always one starting to fuss at about the three and a half hour mark. This makes 18 bottles a day that we normally try to prepare daily. In order to heat the bottles to room temperature, we put the bottles for 10 minutes in the Crockpot that we keep on low all day long. This goes much faster than the bottle warmers (we found anyway).

This is 15 bottles so this is for 5 feeds, there was one feeding warming in the crockpot.

We do at least one load of dishwasher a day, one to sterilize the bottles and then every once in a while we make a load for our regular dishes as we can't mix the two. We were so happy earlier in the week when we discovered that our dishwasher sterilizes as well as cleans as long as we wash them all separately from the regular dishes and we use the pots and pans setting. Prior to finding out this amazing information, we would rinse the bottles when the feeding was done, later we'd wash everything by hand (remember there are many different parts to a bottle!) , then rinse (again), then set a huge pot of water to boil, then boil for two minutes, then wait for the water to cool down then lay everything out to dry... what a process this was... EVERYDAY! Now we rinse out the milk quickly, load up the dishwasher and lay out to dry... so much simpler!! I still thank my dishwasher fairies everyday! With the feeding comes the diaper changes, so we change the babies before each feeding and sometimes in between if they've cooked us a smelly surprise, so this makes about 20 diapers a day. We calculated 144 diapers last week. Feedings also come with about 54 burps a day (not counting Daddy's...haha) and countless farts (ditto). Two just farted as I wrote that last sentence! We thought that we would see a lot more poopy diapers but honestly it's not as bad as I imagined. It's bad when it's present and they smell soooooo bad when they fart but I imagined way worse! We do at least one load of laundry a day, one for the babies and a few times a week for our own laundry. We sleep at night when they sleep; we get anywhere from 6 - 7 hours of sleep a day, in 2 to 3 hour increments. We tend to stay awake during the day, going to bed after their 10:30 pm feeding. Sometimes I take a nap right before that feeding so that I can stay awake while I feed them. If I don't take a small nap, I get restless legs and it feels like my body is going to shut down if I don't lay down and I'm sure you can imagine that feeding a baby while laying down is not the easiest! I normally get up shortly before their 10:30am feeding as I still think that 10am is "sleeping in"... Luckily for Gabe, he can nap later in the morning as he stays up in the evenings when I nap. Well, this is only going to be true until Tuesday when he has to get up at 5:45 for work. At least he'll be able to set me up with two babies to feed before he heads out the door. My mother is currently living with us, acting not only as our feeding helper, but our housekeeper, cook and of course, cuddler :). It's a real Godsend to have her here and we're lucky to keep her until the end of the month, especially with Gabe going back to work on Tuesday (Eeeekkkk!!!!). My mother went home last night to get a good night's sleep and this gave me an idea of how the night feeding would go with two people... it actually went quite well, of course, this is because the babies ate well. This is not always the case. One of us sets up the other one with two babies to feed and then tackles their own baby. Feeding two at once works pretty well... it's the burping part that is not the easiest! My babies will learn to be patient very quickly. Of course, the only two that we can feed at the same time are Jacob and Samuel as Zachary is a baby that we need to coax all the time through the feeding or he'll fall asleep! Well that's a typical baby day... on top of that you can't forget that we have to upkeep the house, eat, entertain the dog, etc... It's busy but with three of us including my mother who is a super efficient woman who doesn't know to sit down unless I force her to (and I have to sometimes), it's not too bad. Ask me again in a month when my mother is in Florida and I have to spend my days alone with my babies!

Rest of the week...
We had our 2nd hospital visit this week, well really our 2nd, 3rd and 4th as the babies had three appointments in one morning. Now this would not be easy with one baby needing to feed every 3-4 hours so you can just imagine how fun it was with three! Again, thank God we had three of us as doing this alone would have been a nightmare especially when the babies needed to feed mid-way through the morning! To top it off, the eye doctor didn't want us to give them their full feeding because they didn't want the babies throwing up when he was examining them. Their first appointment was at the discharge clinic where they questioned us about their feeding habits (which we are nailing :) ), and they weighed them. They all gained an appropriate amount of weight! Zachary came in at 6lbs 2oz, Samuel was 5lbs 15oz and Jacob was 5lbs 5oz, good job babies!!!
The second appointment was for their second RSV shot, they were troopers, crying only when the shot went into their leg. Their last appointment was the eye doctor where they put drops in their eye to dilate their pupil and then insert a speculum in their tiny little eyes to shine a bright light in order to examine the back of their eye to ensure that their nerves were growing properly. Poor little buddies... I was holding their legs, a nurse was holding their arms and a doctor was shining a bright light in their forced open eye... broke my heart as they cried their little heart out as they tried relentlessly to close their eyes. Needless to say they had quite a rough day and night after that morning! The next morning Gabe played guitar for them for the first time to try to calm them a little and they seemed to like it quite a bit. We discovered that they only like when he plays in a certain key, they're not fans of high keys... particular musicians already haha!

We keep getting goodies from people... this week, our friend Becky made us tons of snacks that we can just grab while we have 10 minutes to spare.

Amongst the treasure you can find fruit, guacamole and chips, cheese and crackers, veggies and dip, hummus and pita... she is an amazing person!!!

New Years Eve was spent with my little family. Gabe, my mother and I shared a nice lasagna (given to us by our friend Alicia) and a great bottle of red wine (Apothic... same wine my bridesmaid Ainslie had bought for the night before the wedding that I couldn't drink... try it, it's great!).

As far as development for the babies... they're moving a lot more, especially Jacob, he's quite a little wiggly worm! We're having to strap them in the swings now as they end up looking like this...

They've grown out of their preemie clothes (yeah!!) and we are seeing more and more leg chub which is so friggen cute and squeezable!! They are continuing to develop their own little personalities. They are starting to focus a little bit, giving us microseconds of focus at a time. They are now turning their heads towards voices they hear, which is adorable.

The boys had a few more visitors this week; family only still as I'm sticking to my guns about not letting visitors in until their due date. I'm getting pretty antsy as I can't wait to share my love with the people who love me and can't wait to shower our boys with hugs and kisses!

Here are some pics of this week...