Time is Flying

It seems like time is on fast forward. I mean to sit down and write a post but then other things happen and I dont get around to it.

Life is going well. I think I have adjusted to this motherhood thing. For a while there I felt a bit like a deer in the headlights. Im finding my groove. The girls are in a good routine, feed at 7:30, 11, 2, bath at 5:30 last feed at 6pm and then bed. Feed again at 3am and the cycle repeats. Its not too bad we are managing it well. It would be nice if they could sleep through, I cant wait to drop the 3am feed. Ive gotten somewhat used to it now and wake before they do almost every night. Our rule is that if 1 is awake we put them back to sleep until the others wake, if 2 are awake we wake the third. Often one screaming will set the others off anyway so I dont have to wake them up that often. I hate to wake a sleeping baby.

I cant remember if I mentioned but our night nanny left and we couldnt find a suitable replacement. The agency I was working through bought us an 18 year old smoker and an old lady with bleached hair who looked like she should be working the streets not in my house. She also kept on kissing the babies and I just hated thinking of what diseases she was giving them (sorry judgmental I know). so I just told the agency to get lost. It was the best decision I made. It made me feel like I was needed, when they cried I got up to them. There is something about feeding at 3am when everything is quiet that makes you realise what you have. I looked at these 3 babies and the love just flowed - I think this is when the bonding finally started. I was battling with the fact that during the day we have a nanny and during the night we had a nanny - I might as well not have been around. I felt like a spare wheel. Now I am involved during the day, can also have a rest without feeling guilty (how could I have rested in the day having a night nanny?) and get up to them at night. I believe this is what made me feel more like a mother.

Feeding is going OK. Our smallest girl (Little Girl) has a serious vomiting issue. She vomits at least once a day often times more. We have tried SO many things at the moment we feed her upright in a chair, her formula is thickened and we try and leave her for as long as possible afterwards. We wind her thoroughly, often taking 20 minutes to half an hour to get the winds up. I took all of them to the chiropractor, they dont suffer from colic as such but I wanted them to take a look at Little Girl and see if there is any reason why she is so hard to wind. Turns out she has a few spasms in her back muscles and you should have heard the winds that came out both ends after he had worked on her. Shame poor little thing she had them all trapped inside her. I would highly recommend seeing a chiro, it helped alot and now I have learnt how to do it myself.

I am also doing a baby massage class, like in a group of mommies of which I am a part of - imagine that! Im enjoying it alot. I can obviously only take one baby at a time so then I come home and do the massage on the others.

We took the babies out for the first time the other day. We must have looked quite the part. It took us about 20 minutes to get them out of their car seats and into the prams. We went out for breakfast. Shame they were pretty good, except towards the end they started getting a bit niggly.

Vaccinations have been fun. We had our second set the other day. Its not fun having to watch your child crying out in agony. Fat Cheeks got a screaming high temperature that night and I was quite afraid. Needless to say I never slept much just checking up on her every 5 minutes. The other two were fine. New weights are Fat Cheeks 5kg, Banana baby 5.1kg and Little Girl 4.2kg. Next time Ill tell you the story of how Banana got her name.

I seem to be in the shops permanently. There is always something that has run out. Nappies run low at the speed of light. We use around 750 a month. The formula that Im using is often not in stock so I have to buy as many cans as I can when I see it. We use about 15 cans a month!

I posted last time on my decision to stop expressing. It took almost 3 weeks for my milk to dry up. In the end I was actually just getting irritated. Every time the babies cried I would have a leaking session. I was expressing a little bit each day because I was suffering with engorgement eventually I decided to grin and bear it and stopped expressing. It was terrible, I was in pain for many days. I dont know how it works for everyone else but for me it took ages for my milk to stop.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a book/website for age specific stimulation exercises? We do tummy time, bumbo time, playmat time, singing and listening to cd's but any new ideas would be good.

Lastly I did an interview for my companies newspaper. I came out and said we had done fertility treatment so now it will be widely known. Im glad I did so and also mentioned that anyone battling to conceive should contact me if they want to chat.

The babies are also all smiling so much, every time they smile I want to melt. They are also becoming more cute by the day. Im really enjoying them at the moment. Life is good. :)

Why all the Guilt?

Guilt, its such a useless emotion but why, as a parent is it always lurking around? It sneaks up on you at almost every occasion. I never realised how much guilt a mother feels, like all the time.

I feel guilty if Im not with the babies all the time. I feel guilty if I want to take a nap, eat something, go to the shops or just have a rest from the babies. We have a wonderful nanny who is at the babies beck and call all day long. They just need to utter one sound and she is with them but I feel guilty because I should be the one there all the time but I just dont have the energy. I know how bad does that sound. Our nanny leaves at 4pm and then I look after them by myself until hubby gets home round 5pm and let me tell you that 1 hour feels like 10. As soon as 1 baby is settled the next one starts or like yesterday 2 of them were screaming and I was jumping between them trying to settle them again.

Fat Cheeks has now started some strange behaviour, every night after her 6pm feed she screams non-stop for an hour. NOTHING you do helps her. Ive tried a hot bean bag, medicine, rocking her, giving her a tag.let, toy, tummy time, giving her water, more milk etc. Any advice on that one would be appreciated.

The source of my greatest guilt at the moment is the decision to stop expressing for them. Ive done it for 9 weeks and I would have done it for longer but when we saw the paed last week for their check-up she said that anything less than half their feeds in breastmilk is considered a waste of time. For me half the feeds are 3 x 3 feeds = 9 bottles which is more than a litre of milk! I would say my milk production is about average and I probably could get up to that 1l a day but then I would be expressing every 3 hours on the dot and I just dont have time for that. As it is I am battling 3 times a day. Right now they get 1 feed a day that is BM, maybe Ill have enough for 1.5 feeds, topped up with formula but I have found that their colic symptoms are worse if I mix formula/BM.

I also want to stop for selfish reasons (theres that guilt again), I would like to eat food (and maybe have a glass of much needed wine) again without worrying that everything Im eating is going to give them cramps or gas, as it is now if one of them vomits their BM feed then I worry about what I ate (guilt again). I would like get up in the morning and not have to rush for my pump because Im in such alot of pain or go out without having to worry about pumping during that time. The worst symptom I have is when they cry my poor bo.obs feel like they are about to burst and I leak all over, I can hardly stop dealing with them to go and pump. I cant just give one of them the bo.ob because they all eat at the same time and then that whole schedule is out and Ill end up feeding all day long. The worst part is that I have the milk, a fair amount so stopping is so much more of a difficult/guilty decision which is why I would have been happy to continue but then the paed said its really not worth my while and now all my will to continue pumping is just gone. Am I a bad mother to want to stop? Do you think 1 feed a day is a waste?

Ive been off the eg.ly.nol now for a day trying to decrease the supply but its an anti-depressant aswell so now I feel a bit all over the place and wonder if I should just carry on but then I go back to what Ive just discussed above. I cant start on another AD until my milk supply has stopped or else I cant give them that milk and there just isnt any way I can throw pumped BM away.

Another source of guilt was the night nanny situation. We had a night nanny for about 3 weeks but when they used to wake up I used to lie in bed feeling the most horrible guilt ever. When she told us she no longer wanted the job, I was actually happy as I felt like I was missing out on time with them. Yes, of course I am tired getting up to them but then dont thousands of other people get up to their babies every night? They are actually very good at that feed because they are hungry and sleepy so the feed goes really fast. Im normally back in bed in 1 hour, hubby helps but goes back to bed as the first one finishes so he can at least function at work the next day. Its working for us for the moment albeit we do get tired. At least one source of guilt is now gone...

Trip the Light

So here I am, changed things up a bit and decided to start a new blog!

Why the name?

My blog is called Trip the Light as a play on many words, most obvious my triplets but also the "trip" it took to get here (4.5 years and 7 IVF's - if you so wish you can learn all about my trials and tribulations at my previous blog). I also often feel like Im in the dark when it comes to motherhood, as if the lights have tripped - after many years of infertility and then finding myself with 3 children I often find this overwhelming and finally it is not lost on me that I could be in a psychedelic trip, living in disbelief that Im finally a mother and also living with an exhaustion that oftentimes makes me think Im hallucinating...

My ground rules

My new blog is a place where I want to try and forget about infertility. I need, for my own sanity not to dwell on the past. I acknowledge where I came from but I need to divorce the past from my present.

I will talk about my triplets not by their real names but rather by names that we have given them here at home - Fat Cheeks, Banana Baby and Little Girl.

I will discuss parenting issues so if this is not what you are interested in please dont make my life a misery for it. I am damn proud of my girls and Im gonna say so.

So here I am dusting off the baby dust* and trying to make way to embrace motherhood.

*I promise to never use that term ever again