My Diary of Triplet Fatherhood

A little game: I’ll try to describe this picture in only two words.

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Here goes…

“It’s started!”

“She climbs!”

“Uh-oh!”

“Don’t fall!”

“Safety gate!”

I’ve just realised that I haven’t made a father’s day post and, seeing as it’s my first, I don’t think I should let it go unrecorded.

It’s funny. Until this year, I’d always felt unequivically cynical about Father’s Day. It was just a commercial manipulation of families across the nation, positioned neatly in the Summer when retailers are feeling the pinch of not having any big-spending holidays to bouy their sales, and not based in any historically spontaneous celebration of fathers or fatherhood.

But I’m not one to ever resist a reason to be celebrated or, in this case, the lie in J offered to let me take. And, once I’d lay in, it seemed churlish to not go along with the rest of the day, especially when I got three little presents from and a card signed (well, scribbled) by my girls. I loved that card. Their scribbles summed each of my daughters up perfectly. Evie’s was small and cautious, Scarlett’s big and involved while Jem’s was frenetic and wild. I think I’ll keep that card for a while to come.

We’d originally planned to go to a little Thai cafe in Headingley that afternoon but switched at the last minute, deciding to go to Pizza Hut instead. I’d dreamt about pizza the night before and was craving it still so we headed to a place I’ve not visited since I was a teenager. Like Father’s Day, I’d come to regard chain restaurants as commercial and rubbish.

How wrong could I be? It was brilliant! Sure it was commercial but what I realise now is that much of the reason I didn’t want to go to Pizza Hut before was that it wasn’t aimed at me. With a family the experience was completely different. The girls were given balloons by a lovely waitress and spent the entire time reducing one another to hysterics across the table. The music was loud enough so we didn’t have to worry about causing a scene but not so loud the girls were distracted. The staff were clearly used to kids. And, despite from being lured into ordering more pizza than we could eat in a month by the menu, it was great.

So maybe I don’t mind Father’s Day so much after all. Especially if it’s anything like this again next year (and every year after that).

Poor Scarlett. She’s discovered choice. And along with it she’s having her first experiences of frustration.

See, in her small world there is currently nothing more important than standing up. In her cot, on steps, on the sofa, against saftey gates, the crossbars of highchair legs, even on her mum and dad, if there’s a handhold to be found, Scarlett is there, chubby, little legs wobbling as she holds herself precariously upright. She loves it.

And who can blame here. With the ability to stand upright she has opened up a whole new dimension for exploration. She’s come to know the rooms of our house in stages, first looking around, then rolling around, then crawling around and now standing at the edges. Each time her mobility increases, there’s a whole new range of things to poke, eat and whack enthusiastically.

Not to mention suddenly discovering you can hold your body in a completely new direction. Imaging discovering the ability to walk on walls or ceilings. Until the novelty wore off you’d bo everywhere perpendicularly.

So when it’s time to go to bed, although she may not be able to speak yet, she doesn’t need to for me to understand her frustration. She was busy. She was having fun. There’s still more exploring to do. It’s not fair. She doesn’t want to go to bed.

Even when we’ve wrestled her into her sleeping bag, said good night, switched oof the light and left, she stands in her cot and cries. Yes, I did say ‘we’ – it’s not easy for just one person to keep her from rolling over ready to stand up as they struggle with zips and poppers.

Every lunchtime and evening is marked by listening to her cry in frustration from her room at the injustice of her important exploration being interrupted. Poor thing. When your world is so small, your every action so focussed, your experience so limited, even the little frustrations in life are tragedies.

I was away from my children for the longest time ever this weekend, for four days and three nights, down near Cambridge, meeting up with a group of old friends to chat, play games and generally catch up and goof about.

I’d been nervous before leaving, unsure if I’d miss my new, little family too much to really enjoy myself and full of parental anxiety that flitted from worry to worry, looking for something to settle upon. Would J be OK alone? Would the girls miss me? Would they remember me when I returned? What if there was an accident with me so far away? What if someone fell ill? What if? What if? What if?

But I needn’t have worried, on either count. My family was fine without me and I, despite regular pangs of homesickness, managed to lose myself in several days of unadulterated fun and nights of uninterrupted sleep (what a trooper I am).

The strangest part was coming home. The girls seemed smaller than I remembered, and, for the first five minutes of being back, they also seemed, somehow, more identical. Being only in their nappies never helps, sure, but it was still quite a shock to find I could no longer tell who was who even when I looked closely.

For those five minutes, I got a glimpse of how strangers must see my children. Without my fine tuned sense of who has which dimple, how each smile and expression looks, their laughs and voices and current mannerisms, their storkbites, birthmarks, bumps and scratches, and all the other minutae that make my daughters seem so unique, I felt suddenly distant from them. It was as if, in those four days, the familiarity I’ve come to expect had slipped way, and, with it gone, I realised how much I value the closeness my girls and I have developed.

And then, in a moment, my vision shifted and I could tell Evie from the laugh she gave every time she caught sight of me from the bath tub, I could tell Lettie from the way, having followed me to whenrever I was, she pulled herself up on me to wobble precariously on two feet and I could tell my Jem from her dimple as she grinned and clapped her hands and patted her mouth in the red indian warcry I taught her before leaving.

The best part of going away, for all the fun I’d had, was that moment, when I properly came home.

During the early days of being a dad, my thoughts would continually return to a handful of simple desires. Sleep, of course, was the holy grail. Not only would I talk about it, compare how much I’d had to yesterday or to how much J was having, measure every activity in terms of how much sleep I might have if I found a quicker way of doing it, but it became such a fixation that I even dreamt about it when I was sleeping. There were other desires that I had to remind myself to be patient waiting for: spending the evening with J, not having such a mountain of bottles to sterilise, being able to take the girls out for the day without Gina Ford’s strict regime of feedings (specified amounts, at specified times) and naps (no toys, in a darkened room, at specified times). It seemed like the daily freedom I’d taken for granted a few months earlier was gone for good.

Well, they weren’t. For a couple of months now, the girls have slept from 7 til 7 without a peep, the number of bottles we sterilise will soon be down to 6 a day (amusingly, what parents of singletons have to do daily for a newborn) and, when weather permitted, we have managed to have several successful family morning or afternoon excursions over the last few weeks.

Emboldened by these achievements, we have decided to do a brave thing this summer. We’ve booked a holiday. For a whole week, we’ll be sacrificing the convenience and safety of home for a cottage in Llandudno.

This weekend past, we had something of a dry run, spending all day Saturday and Sunday out with the girls, first in Otley, then right out in the Yorkshire Dales. We left early in the morning, the baby bus piled high with bottles, nappies, toys, clothes and everything else we thought might be needed once far from the security of home and didn’t return until it was time to start the bedtime routine at 5 o’clock.

And it was great. Mostly, anyway. And those things that did go wrong, I’m glad did so on our dry run. I learnt, this weekend, for example, that once all three girls have been lulled to sleep by the motion of the car not to stop for an ice cream twenty minutes into their 2 hour lunchtime snooze no matter how tempting the van looks, to always pack jumpers and waterproofs no matter how scorching hot it is when you set off otherwise you might have abandon the possibility of a nice pub lunch for a soggy sandwich in Sainsbury’s cafe, and that we need to plan some time during the day for the girls to have a long crawl around. We did so on the first day, stopping for the afternoon in a park, but not on the second. By the time we got home they were like coiled springs, Scarlett pulling herself up on every available object, Evie rolling over and over from one toy to another while Jemima crawled laps of the kitchen, shouting jubilantly at the top of her lungs. Poor things, it was as if they needed to get a whole day’s playing into the half-hour before bed.

In fact, the only thing that concerns me now is the weather and how safe the cottage is, both factors being crucial to the girls burning off enough energy to sleep the night away. Evie woke at 2 am, 3 am and 5 am this morning and I’m sure it’s because she didn’t get her full daily quota of rolling around in.

On the plus side, our dry run did give us the opportunity to invent a new game. It’s called Hands Full Lottery and consists simply of trying to guess how many complete strangers will approach you with the sole purpose of telling you, “you’ve got your hands full” during the course of an afternoon’s stroll. J won the last game. I optimistically guessed at 23 or more when in fact only 19 people spoke the magic words. It was great. For the first time I was actually wishing more people would approach us and repeat the same old lines.