One of the questions that I often get about my life with triplets plus their older brother is, “How do you do it?’
I usually just smile and say something like, “Oh I don’t know, I just do.”
But to be honest, I don’t really know how to answer that question. I don’t really know how I am able to care for triplets. I didn’t know in the beginning how in the world I was going to handle having triplets but I had to figure it out. I didn’t have a choice I had to learn how to care for them. Let’s just say that necessity is a great teacher.
Now that I am just about three years into this journey of raising triplets, I think that I have come up with a few tricks to how to handle triplets. Well, at least handle them while they are newborns. I am still working on how to handle the whole three toddler thing.
Let the house go. This is the number one thing that I did and still do. With four kids ages 2 and under there is no way that you can keep the house clean. Just give yourself that. There will be time when they are older to clean the house. And besides as soon as you get one spot cleaned up a baby will vomit or poop on another spot.
When people ask you if they can help, have them bring food. In those early days, your world revolves around feedings. There is really not time for anything else. It is so helpful to just open the fridge and have a prepared meal to warm up and serve to the members of the family that can eat something besides baby formula.
Color code the kids. For other people and yourself, it is really nice if you give each kid a color and stick to that. For us Jake is blue, Quinn is green and Claire is pink. We still use this to this day for pacifiers, cups, blankets and in the early days when no one could tell who was who, we dressed them in these colors. It was good for Hayden too because if he found a green pacifier on the floor, he just knew it went to Quinn. No questions.
Set a schedule and stick with it, no matter what. In the early days and even now, we live by a schedule. I feel that if you want to have any kind of sanity, you have to stick with a schedule. And you need to make other people work around your schedule, remember you are the ones that have to live with the babies and a schedule will help you do that.
Hire help. Now, we were not fortunate enough to have nannies or nurses. It wasn’t in our budget. But we were able to hire my sister every other night to come in and do the midnight feeding. She would come to the house about 10:30pm and then Jeff and I would go to bed. She would then feed the kids when they woke up at midnight and then she would leave after the feeding. This was just what we needed. It allowed Jeff and I to get 6 hours of sleep in a row which was awesome. Find someone in your life that could possibly do this for you, a cousin, a niece/nephew, a neighbor, someone. This helped me stay motivated. Just knowing that there was a full night of sleep in my future was the best.
Teamwork. Jeff and I were/are on the same team. We supported each other, took turns and cared for our children. To me, there is no other way. Family helped us out but at the end of the day, it was just us. Still is and always will be.
If one baby wants to eat, they all eat. Now this ‘rule’ right here is very important. In the middle of the night, when one baby wakes up because he/she wants to eat, wake the other babies up to eat. This is the only way to ensure that you get some sleep. If you don’t do this, you will be constantly feeding babies every hour or two. It makes for a very long night.
Get out of the house. After the babies were born, I had one main goal, to get out of the house by myself. I am not a home body and I knew that if I wanted to remain sane, I would have to figure out a way to get out. It was a challenge and took some creative thinking and placement of children but I did it. I could leave the house with all four kids and go places.
Punish the older kid. When the babies were born, Hayden was 2 and half years old and he learned really quickly that when I was feeding babies, he had free rein of the house. He got into a great bunch of mischief and I think it was after he took a pudding cup he was eating for snake and painted the walls of my bathroom that I realized, hungry babies can wait while their brother was put on the naughty chair. Once Hayden realized that I would stop a feeding to deal with him, his behavior improved.
So that is what worked for me, for us. I am continually learning new things and I hope that this will help someone else figure out their way. And maybe some day, I can even write a post on how to handle three toddlers.
Yeah, right.
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