My Diary of Triplet Fatherhood

We went for the milestone 28 week scan this morning and as the ultrasonographer said,

“They couldn’t be doing better if they tried!”

Good news, huh? They all have enough fluid around them, J’s cervix has failed to shorten or funnel again, they are all growing and putting on weight and their weights are within the normal range for foetuses their age.

Of course, as the way with milestones, passing one reveals another waiting further along the road. Now we are aiming for 32 weeks. After that time babies have over a 99% chance of survival without longterm damage due to prematurity.

Still, the fact that we have got this without a single complication far is very good going. Now if J can just survive this heatwave and the concomitant hayfever we’ll all be doing great.

Anyway, here’s the pictures they gave us of the little fellas. They’re all head shots this time. Their bodies cross over in the middle of J’s belly and all that shows up there on the scanner is a cthuloid mass writhing of limbs and bellies. The bottom picture (Snoozer) is the best. You can really see the profile of his face and how he is getting chubbier and generally filling out.

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I haven’t seen the babies for almost two weeks now and can’t wait to check out how they’re doing. From the impressive kicking they give their mother I think they’re probably pretty alright but it’d be nice to actually see them and to have them measured and checkout out.

The scan on Thursday is the magic 28 weeker after which the babies have a much improved chance. If everything is OK then it’ll probably be OK until the end, or at least if something does go wrong the repurcussions are much reduced, especially with the steroid injection that J was given a few weeks ago to stimulate lung growth.

As for the kicking – wow! I have actually seen them push up the skin on J’s tummy once or twice, they’re getting so strong, and even when they’re not kicking, it’s possible to feel lots of little movements in her tummy. Despite this, I’ve still had no luck picking up anything with the pinard stethoscope I bought for a few quid off Ebay. It’s basically just a cone-shaped piece of plastic that is supposed to amplify a baby’s heartbeat. They were in common use by midwives before ultrasound came along but aren’t used so much nowadays, either, I guess, because there’s some kind of knack to using them that I haven’t figured out yet or they’re just rubbish. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

J is bearing up well despite being more and more tired with each passing week. It’s partly because she doesn’t sleep through the night. Turning over in bed is becoming something of a logistical exercise what with the ever-increasing bump and the many cushions and pillows that require exact positioning for it to lie comfortably. Things are exascerbated by how hot it is right now as she’s already sweltering most of the time. Fortunately the challenges of turning over have not escalated into a two man job yet, nor is the cushion-based bump-scaffold taking up so much room that I have been forced to find somewhere else to sleep. But I can tell it’s only a matter of time.

Otherwise we have been continuing to amass baby stuff and get the house ready. Our lounge is half full of triple buggy, cot, playpen, bouncer chairs, baby swings, baby slings, high chairs and all the other accroutrements of parenthood. In addition, I have been stocking up on things like washing powder, toilet roll, tinned food and all the other accroutrements of surviving nuclear winter… I mean, being housebound with newborn triplets. J’s nesting instincts are kicking in now and nothing makes her happier than more baby stuff or supplies being brought home or things being cleaned spotless. I just hope there’s room for the babies among all this stuff when we actually bring them back. As well as the living room, the spare room is stacked high with boxes of clothes, toys, nappies, moses baskets and other baby stuff, and there’s a tower of toilet roll up to the ceiling in the nursery.

Thanks SO much to everyone who’s helped us buy all these things. I don’t know how we would have managed to buy all this stuff without the generosity of our friends and family. The baby list has filled up lots over the past month. I just hope the babies stay in long enough for us to get the rest of it in time, and that it all fits in our house.

I never imagined I’d be considering moving house merely to gain more storage space but then again, I am in my thirties now and I suppose this is the kind of thing thirty-somethings (or thirty-nothings in my case) think about. I never spared a thought to storage when we bought the place – it seemed massive compared to one rented room J and I had shared at Kate’s. Actually, I think the fact that our house has 5 rooms spread over 4 floors is more concerning than any storage issues. Both J and I are going to get fit carrying the little’uns up and down all those stairs. Of course, the logistics of having to manouvre three small babies around the house wasn’t a consideration when we were buying either. But it’s too late to move now so we’ll have either to make the best of the situation and look on the bright side – ie. we’ll get fit – or have a dumb waiter installed.

These are the pictures from last week’s scan. At the time I thuoght they weren’t very clear but actually you can see the babies really well in the second and third pictures. The second picture in particular shows the baby’s face.

They seem to have put on a lot of weight in the last few weeks. Their cheeks and arms seem much chubbier than they were although from the power of their recent kicks I suspect it might actually be muscle they’re putting on. I wonder if they do kickboxing anywhere. Anyway, enough waffle… here’s the pictures:

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One of the babies (Wriggler, I think) is determined to squeeze up under J’s ribs at the moment. It sounds really unpleasant. She didn’t get much sleep last night because of the pain and I can only imagine it will get worse from now on in. The pregnancy reaches twenty-seven weeks tomorrow so there’s (hopefully) 5-7 weeks left where the babies will be growing and putting on weight. I just hope it doesn’t become too bad for her.

Good news! We went for a scan today and nothing has changed. That means the size difference between the twins is just a natural variation. No two (or in this case, three) babies grow at the same rate and ours are no different. So, even though the size difference is quite a lot (the largest is over 900 grams, and the next heaviest 850 while the smallest is only 729 grams), there’s nothing to worry about.

Jane, our consultant, has decided to go back to only scanning every two weeks again, so, by the time we go back to the hospital again J will have carried the babies to the magic twenty eight weeks. If everything goes as well as it looks likely to in the next two weeks, we will have reached our first big milestone since we were anxiously holding out for 12 weeks, when the chance of miscarriage drops away sharply. At twenty eight the chance of survival, if the babies are born that prematurely, gets better and better with each passing day as they lay down fat, finish the development of their major organs, and most importantly, their lungs develop properly.

As usual, there was a moment during the scan where the picture showed one baby being kicked viciously in the temple by a sibling. This time though the baby was also being head butted from behind which is hardly what I’d call a fair fight. I’m sure that he gives as good as he gets though, from the kicks, wriggles and punches I feel from J’s bump whenever they’re awake. Movement has changed again from occasional hefty kicks to even heavier kicks interspersed with lesser movements. When they’re really at it, such as when Wriggler is trying to bury up under J’s ribs, the movement is constant.

As well as feeling them, I’ve discovered that they can hear quite well now, too. Late last week I dropped a saucepan while washing up. J was sitting on her sun-lounger in the Kitchen keeping me company and said all three babies jumped in alarm at the clang the pan made as it landed. I have also been reading them poetry which seems to make them move about in what I presume to be pleasure. Colonel Fazackerley, Disobedience or The King’s Breakfast by A. A. Milne, and either The Jumblies or The Dong With The Luminous Nose by Edward Lear seem to get the best response. I think it’s the strong meter.

I guess some people might think it a little early for bedtime stories but apparently newborn babies find songs, music and poems they have heard in the womb very soothing even if they don’t hear it until quite a few months after their birth. Plus I really enjoy it. In fact, several of those poems are ones my mum used to read to me when I was little. So never mind months. Thirty years later I still find them soothing.

I went to my first Ante-natal class today. Well half of it anyway. It’s actually the third that J has attended but with already having to take a half day off every two weeks (and now weekly) to go for scans, I haven’t felt like I could ask for more time from my already very understanding workplace. In any case, it seems like I wasn’t missing a great deal from the reports J brought back: just a nurse talking through things that we have already read about or that don’t really apply for triplets. For example, we’re having a caesarean* so none of the stuff about childbirth is relevant.

Today’s class, however, involved a tour of the delivery suite and SCBU (nothing to do with diving, I’m afraid – SCBU stands for the Special Care Baby Unit) which was definitely worth attending even though the tour took quite a while. Our ante-natal group is all mothers of twins except for J so no-one was moving too fast. I’m just glad that the dicky lift at the hospital didn’t break down with me and ten pregnant women squeezed together in it.

The tour was great. It really brought home to me the reality of our situation. Seeing the place where, perhaps only in a few weeks time, my babies will be being brought into the World was a powerful experience. I would have liked to have seen the actual theatre where J will have her caeserean but they didn’t want twenty-odd people wandering around a sterile area. Still, it was useful to get a feel for the place. Strange surroundings can add trauma to stressful times.

There were some triplets in the high-dependency room of the SCBU. One was being fed while the others slept. They were so beautiful, it made my heart stop. And so tiny and vulnerable. J saw their birth announcement in the paper not long ago and the family live near us somewhere. It would be nice to meet them. Having triplets is a strange and unfamiliar experience. It would be brilliant to have friends who were going through the same thing not to mention how good it would be for the kids to know another set of three.

Next to the triplets was another baby. It had been born at 26 weeks and was even tinier. So small in fact that the premature baby clothes were hugely baggy on the poor little feller. Our babies would be even smaller than that if they were born now. It hardly bears thinking about. I felt so immediately protective on seeing a baby who wasn’t mine that I cannot imagine how it would feel to have a baby of my own who was so small.

It was also nice to see other parents who are going through a similar time. I had to slip away after the tour so couldn’t chat to anyone much but J stayed and got to share a little with other multiple mums and dads to be. Between this, all our books on multiples, the TAMBA forums and the Yorkshire multiples group were getting a lot of opportunities to gain insight into what lies ahead.

* I say “we”. I’m sure J would have something to say about that. That something probably involving words like ‘slice’, pain’, ‘scalpel’ and ‘rummage’.

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about what a parent gives to their child. Not so much the transitory stuff, the stuff that money can buy – rather, the lasting things: personality, aspirations, behaviour, philosophy, attitude, being. The filters through which we interact with the World at large.

A few things prompted this train of thought. The first was a passage I read in The Prophet by Khalil Gibran:

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Reading this really provoked a lot of questions. What am I going to give to my children? Who will I be to them? What will they take into the World for having me as a father? How much choice do I have in what I impart? All pretty scary things to consider. All prompted by a realisation that you do not truly control how your children turn out. Essentially I was asking myself who I am, and, when I look on myself with as much dispassion as I can manage, how much good will I do my children as I am.

The second incident was in response to filling out a questionnaire for a TV programme J and I were considering taking part in. It’s since fallen through but we didn’t know that last weekend when we set about the thick set of questions they’d sent over. Questions included things like “What role did your mother/father play in your life?” and “What personality traits would you want to pass on to your children?”, “Which would you want them not to inherit?”, “If you could give your children one piece of advice, what would it be?”, and so on. Again, not inconsequential things to consider.

Finally there was a visit from my mum yesterday. She had driven up from London with a mass of baby stuff she has collected or bought from various friends, charity shops and auctions (as well as some beautiful knitted cardigans from my Nanny). While we were chatting it really hit me how similar our outlooks are. We share a common strain of indefatigable optimism, a faith in life, a patience, an instinct to see the best in people, a tendency to do things ourselves rather than ask for help and, well, lots and lots of other things.

Of course, when I say “share”, I mean I have inherited those things from her. Which isn’t so very strange. We all have, I am sure, veins of our parents’ characters running through us. What really struck was that these are all things I would really like to pass on to my kids and, most tellingly, that these are elements of my mum (and of myself) that neither of us actively choose to display.

With all the questions that had been floating around in my mind, that visit made me realise that there are going to be a lot of things I have no choice about passing on. There are, I think, things I might be able to not pass on to them. That’s different.
But there’s no point trying to be someone other than who I am in order for them to learn something I don’t know. If I believe a certain behaviour is worthwhile I should change myself for the simple reason that it’s the right way to be. And if my children learn from me as I am then, perhaps I will have had some control over the things they take forward into their lives.

As another Gibran poem says, “only when you give of yourself do you truly give”.

I guess that might all sound a little fatalistic. It’s not. I am determined to be the best dad I can be. I am ready for hard work, tough times, being tried in the fires of threefold two-year old tantrums and through it all to keep doing the best I can, to never lose patience if I can help it, to never stop loving them. That is something I can choose to do. I cannot choose how my children turn out. I’ll just have to have faith that, when the time comes for it, they make the right choices as well.

OK. I’m sorry. Enough of the song lyric post titles.

We went for another scan today. It seems that there’s not a lot really that’s changed since last week. There’s no change with the baby who less fluid than his (or her) twin. However, if the babies were suffering from twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome the other twin would have an abnormally large amount of fluid surrounding it. Still, we have to wait and see.

They couldn’t do measurements this time. Ther’s no point unless you’ve waited at least two weeks. If measurements are taken more often, the margin of error is larger than the amount the babies are likely to have grown so the results cannot be trusted.

However J is being tested for diabetes next week. She has been extraordinarily thirsty recently and it could be that her kidneys are being overwhelmed by the demands three foetuses are placing on them. She has to fast from midnight and then have blood taken first thing, drink a bottle of lucozade, wait two hours to give her body a chance to cope with the sugar overload and then have some more blood taken. As I understand it, if there’s still sugar in her blood it means her kidneys aren’t working properly.