I am often asked what a typical day is like with newborn triplets and I realized as the girls get older, schedules change. My favorite question is 'How do you do it?' and my response is always 'My husband and I are a team and we don't know any different.' We are blessed to have these healthy girls and will do what it takes to nurture them as well as we can. As we approach celebrating six months with our girls, I thought it was appropriate to reflect on our schedule thus far:
Feeding:
Within the first month of everyone being home we had the girls on a strict four hour feeding schedule - 7, 11, 3, 7, 11, 3 (thanks to the NICU who initiated this schedule). This meant that Brant and I (and anyone else who was staying with us or lived near us) woke up at least once in the middle of the night for the hour long feeding. Yes, it takes two people nearly an hour to feed/change all three babies.
In the past month, we have kept with the four hour schedule during the day time but instead of waking up the girls to feed them at 3am, we let them wake us up. It is not always the funnest way to wake up to a screaming baby but often it meant that Brant and I would get an extra hour of sleep. When someone woke up, we wake up the other two girls and feed everyone. There is no way to sustain a feed-on-demand schedule for triplets - you would never quit feeding, NEVER.
Sleeping:
When spending time in the NICU, it is always daytime. The lights are always on and often tests/procedures are done during the nighttime when there are the fewest visitors. So when you bring your babies home from the NICU, you often have to reverse the sleeping pattern and begin to slowly turn the lights down when it is nighttime. While we encouraged the girls to sleep at night, they often woke up in search of their binkies or a snack. For the first couple months, we basically had someone sleep with the girls and took shifts assisting when needed. By the time we got to CA, the girls began to sleep in their own room and we no longer had an on-call person. Instead Brant or I would get up and assist when needed.
Eventually Brant and I split up the night because the need of binkies and snacks was too frequent. Before the 3am feeding I would get up for each cry and after Brant would - remember there are three babies, that's three times the amount of crying too. While the idea of this was that one of us could get a straight three hours of sleep at some point during the night, we were still very exhausted.
As for napping the girls did it whenever, wherever and however frequently they desired. When alone with the girls during the day, I found that I could handle two girls ok, but three girls (especially when upset) was very difficult. So this is why I never initiated a nap time. I preferred the idea of random nappings as it usually meant someone was asleep. Of course, this meant that from the time I woke up until the time we put them to bed, it was non-stop babies.
Pumping:
Since the girls were born and I was trying to produce enough milk for three babies (who were too small to nurse), I pumped every three hours for about a half hour. Unfortunately the girls never took to nursing, they got too used to bottles - thus began my long term relationship with my pump. This continued until about August when I changed to pumping every four hours to be timed nicely with the girls eating every four hours. While this adjustment allowed me to sleep a bit more, it was difficult for me to be alone with the girls as I had to keep them calm and happy while pumping. Keeping three babies calm is a big task, even more so with limited hand availability.
In October, I was convinced to cut down on my pumping (especially after Brant pointed out that I had produced enough milk to fill a 50 gallon garbage can in just four months). I was beginning to go crazy - it was time. I spent so many hours a day pumping and feeding babies that I wasn't able to have as much 'play time' as I would have liked. I spent at least three hours a day pumping + all the time for bottle/pumping supply preparation/storage which doesn't count the time to actually feed the babies. I gave the girls four good months of 5/6 milk and 1/6 formula per day and they were growing well with (thankfully) no health issues.
Eventually I cut back to pumping three times a day for 20 minutes - it feels like a world of difference as I gained a good two hours back each and every day. It meant that I only had to balance two babies on a jumbo boppy pillow and one in a bouncer chair while pumping ONCE a day when Brant was working. This balancing act was beginning to get to be more challenging as the girls started to like rolling and squirming around. The girls were getting about 4/6 milk and 2/6 formula - not too bad considering their mom was a bit more sane.
Then my world changed forever:
When meeting with our pediatrician she alerted us of the need to sleep train the girls. Apparently it is around this time (4-6 months) that babies can begin to 'control' the situation. She warned us that we needed to get control of sleeping and napping now. If we waited too much longer, it would take weeks to train the girls rather than days. That is all we needed to hear, our ears perked up. I couldn't continue on getting up several times in the night and getting so little sleep and neither could Brant. So after a big discussion and even more anxiety we initiated this 'training'. We knew they would be too young to remember it now and wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. So what is sleep training? Well I guess there are several ways to do it, but we went with the quick and dirty method. Decide on a schedule (based on the suggestion of our pediatrician) and implement. The girls would sleep from midnight until 7am - no 3am feeding.
The next step in our 'training' was establishing nap times. Our pediatrician pointed out that if the girls were in daycare they would have two 2-hour naps a day. Previously, I honestly had no idea who was napping how much, I was just thankful when everyone was calm. The idea of a nap time (let alone two) sounded dreamy. I thought to myself: I get two breaks during the day? I can shower every day? I can eat with both hands? I can go to the bathroom without someone screaming? These were all foreign concepts to me unless we had company in town helping.
Once we initiated nap time, my world changed for good - there is no going back now. I am now able to pump during their afternoon nap without juggling any babies. I don't even know what to do with myself. Sometimes, I watch tv and sometimes I just sit and enjoy the quiet time. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't easy. There was crying - a lot of crying. One night Brant even found me in the closet sitting on the floor crying, because I felt so horrible about letting the girls cry. I swore I would never let the girls just 'cry it out' but our pediatrician assured us that no trauma would be inflicted on the girls. It took all we had to get through the first week. Thankfully, as I write this we are past week one and things are definitely getting better. There is still crying, but it is much less. The girls seem to like the structure and seem ready for their naps when they are due (which does not mean they enjoy the two hour long nap time). There is still some whining the first ten minutes of napping/bedtime but typically this whining subsides. With this new structure our awake time is much more intense, but I have the energy for it because I am not nearly as burnt out. Quality time over quantity of time. The main reward besides sanity and downtime I get from this schedule is the gigantic grin I get from each girl when naptime is over. It is something I cherish. Those big smiles make it all worth while.
No complaints, no looking back. In the past six months, we did what we needed to and we are glad that we did. Now we start a new chapter which involves more structure and thankfully more sleep. This is one huge advantage to having our family all at once, we are done with the early months forever.
