{for wyatt}
On January 25th, a woman I know through one of my Moms of Multiples groups lost one of her twins, Wyatt, at 5 months old due to complications with his heart. As part of a larger effort to support the Gard family through fundraising, another twin mom in our group, Amy, is selling headbands and donating 20% of the proceeds to the Gard family. So, if you are in need of a headband for your little girl, please, head on over!
Click here for her etsy shop, JAGDESIGNS27.
Click here for Wyatt’s Caringbridge site.
No code is needed. If you’d like, you can tell Amy that I sent you in the notes at checkout!
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
What 33 weeks can do…
33 weeks can seem like a lifetime. For the babes, it really is. They have now been “around” for 66 weeks. Half inside, and half out. It’s amazing how much can change it what seems like such a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things.
They can go from 2 cells to 4 pound babies.
The can grow from 4 pound babies to 17 pound rolling, laughing, crying, balls of fun.
33 weeks can feel like a lifetime, but it can also seem like it has disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Happy 33 week birthday little ones. Mommy’s proud of you!
Date Night
Date night means something completely different when you have 4 children under 4 years old (Yes, I can still say that for 13 more days).
We’ve started instituting a chore chart for Aiden. If he gets all of his stickers all week long, then he gets a Mommy/Aiden date night! It has been a pretty big success so far, and definitely seems to be improving his general attitude during the week (plus it gives us a really good threat if he starts to misbehave, rather than threatening bed or time out or something else we have to monitor, we just threaten to take it away!)
SO last week we went and saw Beauty and the Beast in 3D and had dinner. It was so much fun! And I got to tell him how that was Mommy’s favorite movie when she was a little girl. He looked very confused. Like he couldn’t comprehend how I was ever something other than his mommy.
This week? We hit up Johnny Rockets, the Mirror Maze, and some amazing FroYo downtown! I wasn’t sure if he’d have fun at the mirror maze, but he had a blast!
They also had a laser challenge where you have to climb over and under the laser lights to get to the end and press the button. He was good at it. Too good. Took a few tries, but he started figuring out the best path without mommy telling him which way to go, and I just stood at the door and watched. It’s amazing watching them learn and discover, and then surprise you by doing more than you expect!
Finally a few pictures!
A few pictures for you finally! First up, evidence that we starve them:Apparently Jacen doesn’t get enough to eat so he has to use his sister’s foot.
Next we have our monthly “Can mommy still hold us all” picture… I think we’re getting close to outgrowing mommy’s arms!
We’ve upgraded feeding time. With taking two meals a day now, we decided it was about time to go ahead and pull out the high chairs instead of using the bumbos on the floor all the time. So far so good, but I can’t wait for them to feed themselves (see last post…).
And finally we have the baby girl practicing her Pilates moves. She can’t go anywhere yet, but she has gotten pretty good at creating a bridge and moving her feet back and forth for a moment before falling over.
On the move… almost.
You always want your kids to learn new things. To grow. To change. To mature.
But then comes the day that you realize, “Man, maybe it’d be better if they stay little for just one more day.”
Whether it’s when they take their first step. Go to their first day of school. Walk by themselves to school. Join that afterschool sport. Leave the driveway in a vehicle withOUT a parent in the car with them. And so forth.
We’re hitting one of those first crucial points – the babies stop staying where you left them.
They’ve gone from sitting in perfect baby death match on a blanket in the middle of the room, to turning your back and one of them (normally Jaina), is somewhere else. We’re still not sure exactly how she gets there – she rolls, and well, but not far at a time, normally just one flip at a time. She doesn’t crawl that we know (When she does it in front of us, she gets on her hands and knees but hasn’t actually made progress forwar). Neverthless, she is no longer in baby death match.
It also means that they get frustrated. They see a toy on the other side of the room and know that they *should* be able to get to it, but they’re not too sure how. Or one baby starts eating another baby’s foot and they get mad because they know they *should* be able to get away, but their legs and arms don’t work quite right yet (cue the belly swimming).
Either way, we’re on that precipice. The one where we go from running to the bathroom quickly while the babies play nicely to having to worry that they won’t be where we left them when we get back.
Maybe one more day of having tiny babies wouldn’t be so bad…
7 months
Wow, they are 7 months old (and one day, but come on, I’m a mom of 4 kids, I’m allowed 24 hour leeway!)
This was as good as I could get of all three. Yes, it is 50 degrees and raining, but we’re not going anywhere, and the outfits were too cute to not be worn! They are 31 weeks old on Monday, so they’ve almost been out as long as they were in. I can barely hold them all anymore (we’ll have to get that picture later today!) and they’re getting more interactive every day. Now if only the girls would grow some hair…
Here we go again…
The good about being done having kids? I can focus on running/weightloss/getting faster without knowing that at some point in the future I’ll have to start all over.
The bad? I lost a lot of stamina and endurance with that pregnancy. Carrying 13 pounds of baby and being 60+ inches around doesn’t really help your midsection, nor does it allow you to do much other than walk (and that is at a VERY slow pace).
The ugly? I have no more excuses. No more reasons why I shouldn’t try harder. No more excuses that I’ll have to slow down eventually so I might as well take it easy now. None.
So here we go again. Unfortunately, this picture sums up my training quite beautifully:
Source: facebook.com via Nicole on Pinterest
So yeah. Wardrobes have been switched out from shorts that ride low to compression capris that hold in the post-baby belly. We had to learn how to run on hills. Because, you know, I was able to avoid those in WA. I could run anywhere I wanted without having to run a hill if I really wanted to avoid them. Here? I have to do at least 100 feet of elevation change just to get from my house to the lower housing area less than a half mile away. And then I have to come back up that to get home.
No more excuses.
And yet, I feel stronger. When we first got here the hill leading to our house would leave me breathless on a run. Today? I did it three times with the neighbor.
Before, trying to hold a conversation during an “easy” run was a joke. The concept of an “easy” run was a joke. The concept of a run that didn’t involve a step of walking was a joke. Now? The neighbor and I did 5 miles last weekend without breaking stride and joking the whole time, still at a faster pace than my half-marathon PR.
I will never win. And my fastest times may be when I’m trying to catch up to the girl scout selling cookies. But ya know what? I can’t get worse, and I won’t ever have to stop again. Some day I might even be able to push a double jogger. And run. All at the same time. For now? The jogger will be reserved for parks and malls, and running will be reserved for girl time with a great friend and burning off those girl scout cookie calories.
That said, next up: Why girl scout cookie season occurring right after new years resolutions are made is just cruel…
Does this make me a bad mama?
So today, Jaina decided to roll on top of Jacen. He proceeded to cry. Then she proceeded to cry. Val lay a few feet away and started to laugh. And my first instinct?
Grab the camera.
Unfortunately, the memory card wasn’t in it and so I went ahead and rescued the babies.
Next time? The camera will be ready. A few more seconds doesn’t hurt, right? 🙂
One year ago today…
A year ago right now, as I sit and type this, I was driving home from Madigan with everything still in a haze around me. What in the world just happened?? Am I asleep? Was it a joke? Did I really hear what I think I just heard??
At 9am I went for my regularly scheduled ultrasound. The one that would release me from being an “RE” (reproductive endocrinology) patient to being an “OB” patient. The one that would tell me all of my nervousness through the holiday and getting bigger faster than I had with Aiden was purely due to being pregnant for a second time, and that the baby was just fine. The one that would assuage all of my fears, expand my hopes, and allow me to email my husband (who was deployed) telling him all was fine. You see, when they’re on a submarine, time travels in it’s own patterns. He normally gets my emails almost daily (except if they go silent, which is a whole different thing), but I would get email in batches. Two here, a weeks worth there, sometimes the same emails for a second time (boy is that a downer when you see 10 new emails come through to find out it’s the same ones you’ve already read!). So with something as big as this, I was anticipating that he would hopefully get my email that night and I’d hear back within a few days.
So as I sat in the ultrasound, and hear “double” and then “triple” my first thoughts went not to how we would pay for/care for/take care of these three new babies. They went to “How in the world am I going to get this news to my husband?!?!” Our emails are screened for situations just like these – whether positive or negative, they don’t want sailors to get that type of news sitting in their rack in the middle of the night. It’s just not good when you’re trapped in a metal tube!
So after finding out, as I sat in the hallway laughing, then crying, then laughing again. My phone went to the first two speeddials that it has during deployments – Ombudsman (the link between families and the command) and the CO’s wife. Both went to voicemail. Goodness, what do I do now?! Part of me wanted to post on facebook. But, my husband should know first! On top of that, I was still only 12 weeks along and the last thing we wanted to do was to tell people that early, much less with something as crazy as triplets, with him still deployed and I didn’t know when he would find out.
I’ve seen some interesting videos online of people finding out it was multiples. Most involved the wife and husband sitting there and laughing, crying, or hugging each other. I wish I had a video to share with him, but at the same time I almost have something better – written tangible proof of our thoughts through the whole process, both mine and his. The one wonderful thing about email during patrols is it records those fleeting moments in life. The days where the email is me venting about a three-year-old who threw a tantrum in a store, to those rare moments of pure joy like finding out your family was going to double that summer.
Thankfully due to schedules and all, the boat was able to get the information quickly. And he was able to find out within 24 hours. The funniest part is that the whole patrol, his emails joked that it was twins (we thought there was the possibility, but never dreamed it could come true). His email that I received the morning of January 6th read, “About the twins, im just messing with you because its funny. I just want another i dont care how many, preferably a girl but ill take what i can finally get.” Little did we know…
Email on January 7th: “Well i guess calling them the twins didnt quite do it justice…I love you dear and i am so happy about this.”
So whenever we talk about the triplets and finding out about them, we have many more people involved in the story than most. From the doctor and nurse in the room whose faces were blank stares at the screen like they couldn’t believe what they saw, to the three-year old who was told he was getting THREE babies, and didn’t even question it, to an ombudsman and CO’s wife who likely had never had to disseminate THAT information to a boat before, to the CO, WEPS, and XO who all heard on the boat, to the crew of the USS Louisiana, SSBN-743(G) who will forever be in our hearts as they were part of one of the biggest moments of our lives.
My how our world can change in the blink of an eye. You never really believe it when you hear from those older than you how you should savor every minute, enjoy life as you can. Don’t worry about the dishes because you’ll only have this minute once. But after that experience? You learn that life really can change in an instant. For better or worse. And this time was definitely for the better.