Coffee or things that make us go.

One of the first things you need to understand about triplets especially newborn triplets is that you can kiss good by to sleep. Oh sure you hear the jokes about the lack of sleep you have with a newborn. I am here to set that myth straight. If you only have one baby you can take turns with you spouse feeding the child, the only person I think may be able to understand the struggle would be the single parent doing it all on their own, since they would have no one to share the load with. As it was thankfully we had family come in for the first week and help us transition from the NICU to home life. The wife and I actually got to sleep a little that first week but after that all bets were off. Lets talk about why we didn't sleep for the first four months. We kept the schedule and color codes that were assigned in the NICU blue for Bobby, Purple for Iris, and green for Cooper. this will come into play later, we feed the kids ever two hours starting with two ounces and working our way up to larger portions over time. Now with three babies and only two parents you have to get creative and only more so as they get bigger and bigger. In the early days it was easy to hold two in your arms while you held the bottles. Lets take a moment to talk about bottles and formula. We went through 64 ounces of formula a day. I would grab a big pitcher and make a days worth in advance. We had trays that I would line with the day's bottles and pour the servings of the day for the kids into color coded bottles. That was the only thing that made sense was to have all the food ready for the day in one of the brief times that the children slept. Truth be told I have a hard time recollecting the first four months of the kids life seeing as I was working full time as a sales trainer around 40 to 50 hours a week then coming home to a tired wife and then fall right back into the every two hours feeding schedule. As tough as it was we decided that they only way to live through this was to live or die by the schedule. Ergo we never needed to sleep train our kids or to this day have no problems with them sleeping through the night. We did this by keeping them on the schedule regardless of their personal desire to sleep. We made them all get up at the same time to eat and change diapers and kept them on the schedule until all wanted to sleep longer then three hours and over time we just kept expanding the time till all of us gradually got to sleep through the night. it only took us four months of utter sleep hell for the adults, but we survived. And Coffee lots of lots of coffee.

Once upon a time

When my wife and I first set out to have babies little did we know the bounty that would befall us. When we found out about the pregnancy we had, at that time, no idea that is was triplets. So fast forward a bit to the first sonogram. We were expecting to see the baby but when the tech said " All three heartbeats are strong."  All the air got sucked out of the room. I was instantly put into a money panic. We were going to be stretched to afford one much less three. I had to sit down as well, my wife was a bit taken aback as well. We went through the normal doctor check ups and everything was going well till about six months. That's when my wife started having contractions and required her to go on bedrest. If you can avoid bedrest I highly recommend doing so. My poor wife swollen with new life could only lounge on the bed only to move to use the bathroom and towards the end that was a trial just making it the 15 feet to the bathroom. During one of her normal checkups at 31 weeks the doctor decided that it was time to have the babies at five and a half weeks early. It was a wonderful birth With Bobby in the lead followed by Iris and then trailed by Cooper, with no complications, but because of the early birth the children needed to spend time in the NICU for observation and mild treatment. For the record the NICU nurses are spot on and a wonderful people at Dallas Medical City. The children spent four weeks in the NICU and during that time my wife spent a majority of her time at the NICU while I worked full time. The day we brought the children home we didn't understand that one of the most important things that the NICU did for us was allow us to sleep.

The first of many.

Hello my name is Robert J Cory and I am a Stay at Home Dad (SAHD) and have been for four years to my wonderful triplets. Bobby, Iris, and Cooper, born in that order. My triplets just started Pre-k and for the first time I have time to write about our experiences.
  To start I will tell the story of the Playground incident that happened on their second day of school.
The class was at recess and as such they have a pretty large playground in the school yard. Well they have this one tall slide that spirals down in  a corkscrew shape and it is the most popular slide in the playground. As the most popular slide it always has a line of kids waiting to ride it. My daughter Iris waited in line for her turn and with all due excitement climbed to the apex and made the classic mistake of looking down. Once she saw how high up she was she decided that she wanted to climb down rather than ride the slide. The problem was that since this is such a popular slide there was a slew of classmates waiting their turn. And all the kids waiting did not want to move and loose their place in line so Iris was stuck at the top of the slide with no way down and stared to freak out a little.  Thankfully her brother Cooper saw her distress.
 Cooper to the rescue went and saw the problem and asked and guided the kids down the ladder keeping them in line and cleared a space for Iris to climb down safely. All before a teacher was able to make it over to the slide to correct the issue. This is one of those moments that makes a parent's heart swell with pride. Now since I was not at the school when this happened it was told to me by the teacher during afternoon pickup. The teacher was a choked up telling the story, said "It was one of the sweetest things she's ever seen."