Is it really possible that 6 months have gone by already? I’ll admit, I got kinda sad the night before their very first half birthday and pouted to Justin about my babies getting too big too fast. He pouted back. Its happening so fast its a little scary. I mean we’re already halfway to their first birthday. The second week of August marked a year since I first found out I was pregnant. When we think of all that has happened in the last year it seems impossible to fit it all into just one year, but it was over before we even knew it. We’re having so much fun with these three and I find myself looking at each of them and thinking “You’re MY kid and I get to keep you for awhile. That’s pretty amazing.” I feel like we are getting to know who they are a little more each day and I daydream about conversations we’ll have as they get older. But then I tell myself to stop thinking about when they’re older because that will happen soon enough.

Grandma Kathy (Justin’s mom) has been working away to open up her own Etsy shop  full of adorable baby/toddler clothes and comfy cozy knit things and we are the lucky recipients of her samples (I think she kinda likes having the test subjects just a little bit, too). She made these sweet little baby pants in the pictures this month and the girls’ matching onesies. It is way too much fun to dress these three. Especially in seersucker.

Six months has been such a fun stage for us. Everyone’s little personalities are really coming out, we’re getting some hard-fought-for giggles and loads of smiles and drool (still no teeth yet though). Pictures are becoming slightly more challenging with the advent of rolling. If we could get them to stay on their backs long enough for a picture the next challenge was to keep hands/feet/toys out of the mouth.

If that face doesn’t make you grin I don’t know what will.

I think Zoey is afraid her tongue may try to escape from her mouth.

So is Quinn. Would you believe me if I said that most days Justin and I wonder if they’re actually identical? I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble telling them apart, they seem so different to us. Oh and these are Q’s signature “Jack Nicholson eyebrows.”

Our own little Billy Elliott! This picture cracks me up. (Mr. Fox is doing the same move, hehe).

Proof that that tongue is most certainly trying to make a run for it.

Hrm…that’s an interesting point you make, Mother, but I would much rather try to fit both fists into my mouth.

Proof that the Golden Boy is not always camera ready.

Zoey “Blue Steel”. Definitely camera ready.

Not camera ready, even with assistance from Dad.

Now you see me, now you don’t!

My name is Zoey, let me sing you a song.

Can I fit this monkey and my hand in my mouth?

My handsome little fella.

My pretty little girl.

My pretty, spunky girl. If you take pictures of a crying baby fast enough you can manage to get one that looks like it could kinda be a smile.

I love that Zoey and Quinn’s hair is getting thicker and growing. It looks like it may be dark after all (we thought they would be blonde, though not quite as blonde as Oliver). Still no idea what color their eyes are and I’m dying to know!

Their 6 month checkup stats are:
Oliver 17 lbs (40th percentile), 27 1/4 in. (that’s 75th percentile for height!)
Zoey 15.4 lbs (30th percentile), 25 1/4in. (35th percentile)
Quinn 14.9 lbs (20th percentile), 25 3/4 in (55th percentile)

I think their heights could very easily be inaccurate though considering the way they’re measured. The nurse just lays them on their back and marks where the tips of their toes and the tops of their heads are with a sharpie. Did I mention that they are constantly rolling and moving and kicking?  Here we are at our doctor’s appointment to help you visualize:

Trips to the pediatrician are really not a one person job. I haven’t been brave enough to go anywhere by myself with all three babies. Maybe this month now that its getting a *little* cooler?

I hope to post some more from the things we’ve been doing soon. I easily have a dozen different posts I could do, but there are some hungry babies waking up now!

In the interest of transparency and working against the internet’s uncanny ability to make the lives of strangers appear just peachy 100% of the time, I’d like to dispel any myths that might be floating around that I’m some kind of super mom who has everything together and all this extra time to do fun stuff and never gets stressed or sad or lonely or wishes she had more time to get things done. In general I’m a pretty positive person so I like to write about positive things, but after receiving a lot of very sweet comments about how “amazing” I am it’s occurred to me that I might be guilty of portraying just a fraction of my life. In case you ever had any idea of me this way, I’d like to tell you that I’m no super mom. Just a woman who still feels like she’s a girl who got pregnant with and gave birth to triplets by the grace of God and is doing her best to live an honorable (and fun) life that has a positive impact on others.

The main reasons I keep up this blog are to document the kids’ lives for our family’s own benefit, but I also know what a blessing it was to me to read other triplet blogs while I was pregnant and even now its still great to be able to read how other families are doing with their 1 year olds, 2 year olds, etc… I’m very aware when I post that there may be expectant triplet mothers reading what I write and that they are looking for encouragement and examples of families who are enjoying having three babies at once and aren’t completely overwhelmed with the whole thing. Being pregnant with triplets is scary for a million different reasons and the only thing other than prayer that helped me to feel prepared in any way was reading the experiences of other triplet families. I would literally count the archives of triplet blogs in the months immediately after their babies were born to see how often they were able to post and think, “Ok, they still have time to update their blog. It must not be too bad.” The last thing I want to do though is to inadvertently make another triplet mom (or any mom for that matter) feel like she’s not doing a good job because my posts make it seem like its so easy for us to have triplets. Its not, by the way.

Justin and I absolutely love having triplets. We say it every day. We laugh at these sweet little babies and kiss them all over and squeeze them tight every chance we get. We choose to have positive attitudes, even when they’re crying and its the middle of the night and he has work in 3 hours and I have to get up and start the seemingly never-ending day of feeding, diapering and playing. That being said, we still lose our patience and have snapped at each other or even a crying baby now and again. It happens, we take a deep breath, we find something to laugh at, and move on. Its hard, but we love our big little family so much sometimes it feels like we might burst. I mean, have you seen how cute these kids are?

Am I rambling? Sorry about that. My point is, we’re two happy parents to three happy babies. Things are still challenging and we’re not perfect, but we would rather focus on the positive than dwell on the negative and be an encouraging example for anyone who might be reading about our journey over the last year (its actually been just a little over a year since I first found out I was pregnant…at this time last year still only thought there was 1 little bean in there though).

Both of us make a lot of effort to try and do things that are important to us individually in addition to taking care of the babies and our other responsibilities like work and household stuff. I think it makes us enjoy our time with each other and the babies even more. When I talk about the stuff I do in addition to taking care of the babies I don’t want to give off a false impression of being able to get everything done and done right with time to spare. So, here’s a little “day in the life” of me, the Not-Super-Triplet-Mom:

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is pump and it takes me an hour to get all of the milk out that builds up overnight. Its not fun. But during that time I can check my email, facebook, blogs, etc. and feel somewhat connected to the world outside of my house (I hear that it still exists). Sometimes I read, sometimes I work on a design project I might have that week. I might have another 10-15 minutes between the time I finish pumping and when the first baby wakes up, so I try to drink my coffee and prepare bottles or straighten up the living room. My outlook for the day is so much better when the space around me isn’t cluttered, but that being said, there is always a basket of laundry that needs to be put away and stacks of mail that I try to ignore on the coffee table or 5 pairs of shoes strewn about the room…so its a constant work in progress to keep things somewhat neat. Here’s a reality check though: I haven’t dusted in a year. The only reason there isn’t mold and fungus growing in our toilets is because my sweet mom cleans them a couple times a month.

Once the babies are up it takes around an hour to an hour and a half to feed everyone. While they eat I might watch some terrible reality tv on Bravo and sometimes I let them cry for their bottles for 30 extra seconds while I turn the tv on and change the channel. They kind of pay attention to the tv so I do my best to turn their boppies so they can’t see it. There should be a study on the long-term effects of secondhand consumption of The Real Housewives of New York City. Kids, if you’re reading this in the future after you’ve been denied acceptance into Mensa, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault. After they eat they play for a little bit on the playmat or bouncer and then are ready for their morning nap. If I can get them to all go down around the same time I might have an hour or hour and a half (sometimes even two if I’m lucky) to get some work done while they sleep.

Since I’m weaning myself from pumping this month I have this time free to do anything, but up until this month I pumped every 3 hours from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, so my activity choices are either reading or working/playing on the computer. Most of the time I read blogs. So, now that I don’t have to pump at this time if I have a freelance design project that’s the first thing on my to-do list. If not I either clean, read blogs about what the babies should be doing this month (and feel bad about not doing all of the “right” activities with them or not bathing them more than once a week), or I work on a sewing project—I started making a quilt out of our old t-shirts from college and am hoping it will be done by the time the weather cools off enough for us to hang outside. The pieces have been sitting in a clothes basket by my kitchen table all summer.

Time to feed the babies again and this time since I feel guilty about having the tv on in the morning I leave it off, but I get bored so I surf facebook status updates and read posts on the triplet forums on my ipod. Then I feel guilty for not making direct eye contact with the babies every second they’re awake. This sounds crazy, but its true. Mothers feel guilty about everything.

We play again for an hour or so after they finish eating and in my head I’m: trying to figure out if I can get my projects done in time, how I’m going to come up with a new idea, how I’m going to execute it, wishing I could spend some time in the office, wishing I could have lunch with friends, wishing I would get an email or a text from friends, wishing I had friends who stayed at home with babies and could come play with us, wishing I could take the babies outside but its 110 degrees every day, wishing I could run errands with the babies but it takes 30 minutes just to load them in the car and by the time we feed them and get anywhere its time to feed them again, wishing we could go to church with the babies but they can’t go in the nursery until they turn 1 since they were 2 months premature, wishing Justin could work from home, remembering I need to make another appointment at the WIC office to update the type of formula Oliver gets because it changed for the 5th time and I’m about to run out and have to buy a can if I don’t do this soon, feeling guilty for stopping pumping at only 6 months when it should be a year, remembering that I forgot to put their vitamins in their bottles for the second day in a row, feeling guilty for putting them down for a nap even though they’re obviously tired because its a relief when they go down for a nap but I don’t want it to seem like I’m just trying to get them asleep so I don’t have to play with them because I like playing with them its just that I have a lot of other stuff I need to get done and I can only do it when they’re napping, worrying that I should be playing some sort of developmentally appropriate game with them that I read about in the stacks of parenting books on my bookshelf… then its back down for another nap and I eat lunch and continue working on whatever project I started in the morning.

Repeat these steps for the next two feedings of the day until Justin gets home from work. If I have a deadline for a project that I’m working on then you’re likely to find a pile of dirty cloth diapers piled up in the nursery waiting to be rinsed and put in the wash, which Justin does before he goes to bed. You’re also likely to find every used bottle from the day piled in the sink rather than clean and waiting to be used again, and you’ll find a half-folded basket of laundry in every room of the house.

Eventually everything gets put away and washed and I feel like we actually do a decent job of keeping up with chores, but these are the things I will put off until later in order to do things I love and enjoy when I can. The fact is we just can’t do it all every day. Things are sacrificed, jobs are halfway done. 90% of my thoughts are consumed with whether I’m doing what I should be doing in that moment; am I being a good mom, am I remaining a relevant creative professional, am I a good friend? There are things I forget to do and things I choose not to do so I have time to do the things I really want to do, but at the end of the day I smile because I know we have such great gifts to be able to parent these children and we are so so happy that we have a house full of joyful squeals and coos and stinky diapers and bottles and laundry and each other. We’re not super, we’re just us. If you read all of this babbling then you might be as crazy as I am. Welcome to the club!

Here’s a reward for all of your effort:

Obviously since the babies were born on the 1st of the month, and being that it’s August 21 (at 10pm) this post is way overdue. I’m sure I have no need to explain why, but in addition to the three infants who require constant daily care, I have also taken on a couple of small design projects and am enjoying helping my mother in law start up her own Etsy shop (hello, fueling my fabric addiction) and—get this—I’ve been reading. Books. Plural. As in, I finished one book and am now a respectable way through another. Anyway, you’re here for babies, so let me get on with it.

First, some photos of the beautiful babes on their 5 month birthday.

In Oliver, Zoey and Quinn’s 5th month of life they did the following:
-Held baby conferences in their bumbo seats.
-Started to hold each other’s hands (mostly on accident, but I like to think they kind of did it on purpose).
-Discovered their love for blankies and how awesome it is to shove a blankie into their mouths with both fists.
-Got sick when Mom and Dad forgot whose drool-soaked blankie was whose.
-Got over colds in 2 days while Mom and Nana were sick for 2 weeks.
-Smiled at Mom when she got them up in the morning. Smiled at Dad when he came home from work every day.
-Got bigger cheeks.
-Discovered how trippy their hands are. Like, whoa.
-Wore shoes for the first time to Aunt Christy and Uncle Mark’s wedding.
-Were in their first previously mentioned wedding.
-Outgrew all their 3 month clothes and made Mom sad at how quickly they’re growing up.
-Went “swimming” in a big pool at cousin Grant’s first birthday party.
-Looked SUPER cute in their little bitty swimsuits.
-Oliver slept through the night regularly, and started finally sleeping in a crib (instead of the magical lamb swing).
-Quinn and Zoey grew out of being swaddled and begrudgingly transitioned to the sleep sack.
-Oliver and Quinn insisted on standing on our laps rather than sitting. Zoey is just fine with sitting, she doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone.
-Grabbed lots of things with their hands. Most favorite things to grab: Mom’s hair and Dad’s beard.
-Blew bubbles and covered their clothes until they were sopping wet with drool and required changing multiple times a day.
-Quinn tried really hard to roll over, practicing every day and never quite making it. Oliver up and decided to just do it one day and then didn’t do it again for 2 weeks. Q finally succeeded but only after O did it first. Z doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone and doesn’t especially like the idea of smashing her pretty face into the ground just to prove a point (and ew, there’s dog hair on the floor).
-Talked all the time. To Mom and Dad and everyone and their toys and the air and the dog. They have lots to say. Oliver grunts and squeals, Zoey whispers sweet nothings, and Quinn goes “la la laaaaaa” while her fingers are in her mouth.

Some favorite outtakes from our 5 month photos:

(To hands): “You guys are my best friends.”

Happy little lady.

“Hey Ma look how far I can stick my tongue out. Its really really far, sthee?!”

Oliver is working on his pensive teenage look.

Zoey’s working on being beautiful (mission accomplished).

Quinn is working on a new diaper.

How do you not fall in love with that face?

The Sweet Z smile.

My gorgeous girl (blowing bubbles, of course).

“MOM I’M GONNA LOOK AND SOUND LIKE I’M YELLING BUT I’M NOT REALLY YELLING I’M JUST WHISPERING TO AN ELEPHANT!”

Little ballerina likes to point her toes.

“MOM I LOOK LIKE I’M CRYING BUT REALLY I’M JUST YELLING CAUSE ITS FUN!”

Handsome boy!

A glimpse into the future of clothes shopping with teenage Zoey. “Mom you have got to be kidding, that’s so embarrassing. Stand over there.”

A glimpse into the future of shopping with teenage Quinn. “When are we eating lunch?”

Just listenin’ to some cool jamz.

Can’t get enough of those chubby cheeks!

Hitting the photoshoot threshhold.

“We don’t have to do this for another month, right?”

“You can take my picture whenever you want to Mama!”

“I’m not tired I’m just resting my eyes.”

Hopefully the 6 month post won’t take almost a month to get up, but I’m not making any promises. Being a month behind with triplets is like being early in singleton baby time, right?