My Diary of Triplet Fatherhood

What have we done? Oh, sure, we had the best of intentions but don’t the architects of all great disasters? And it’s my fault, really. J wanted to wait, to grow their hair out but, no, I insisted in cutting Evie, Scarlett and Jemima’s fringes for them.

I just couldn’t bear to see it bothering them anymore. The longest strands had reached their eyes but they didn’t know to push it away so all day they’d be blinking and squinting as hair tickled their eyelids and brows.

So, optimist that I am, I argued that we should just cut them a fringe. I mean, how hard could it be? Comb it down, snip, snip, snip, and it’s done.

Comb it down, snip, snip, snip and your little girls turn from cute, little, wild-haired urchins to sloping-fringed spods, more like. How hard can it be? Not hard at all… if you’re trying to fit in in a backwoods, red-neck trailer park.

It didn’t occur to either of us that cuttin their hair in the bath would mean that, it being wavy, it would spring back shorter, nor that doing it as quick as possible to avoid the risk of cutting something other than hair might not lead to the straightest cut. And it’s only now I look at them, I realise that a fringe should perhaps blend into the hair to the side of it and not just be cut directly across the forehead.

Poor girls. There’ll be pages now in the family album that I’m sure will get turned past very quickly when future friends and boyfriends show an interest. Either that or they’ll have been so scarred by what we’ve done to them that they end up moving to Tennassee so they can show their pictures without dying from the shame.

Anyway, I’ll let you judge for yourself…

Here’s Jethro.. um ,I mean Jemima…

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… Scarlett (eating her morning grits)…

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… and Evie (with the wonkiest,widest, shortest fringe of all – she was unlucky enough to be the first to have her’s cut).

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And here’s Lettie and Jem in their dungarees, waiting for the ho-down to start up.

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Everyone has their little bedtime rituals – winding watches, saying prayers, double-checking the front door’s locked – the habitual activities that allow them to sleep soundly. For me it’s checking in on my kids.

I always try to tread carefully as I slip upstairs, worrying with each creak that someone will stir. I don’t want to disturb their slumber. Their sleep is special. For me, I know that if I don’t sleep well tonight I can catch up tomorrow, or later in the week, or (as I had to learn to believe in the early days of triplet fatherhood) just sometime. But life is so new to my little girls. Each day is a new journey, full of surprise and revelation, each moment within it lived to the full. And, equally, each night is completely free of care – perfect, of-the-moment sleep it seems a crime to interrupt.

There is also an element of selfishness in not wanting to wake them. Being about to go to bed myself, I’m hoping that I won’t have to rock a crying baby back to sleep, but, also, with a diferent kind of selfishness, neither do I want to be denied my chance to check on them. A slight stirring would see me slipping back downstairs, my chance to check lost, the risk of all of us sleeping too great.

Their room is blackout-blinded and the only light eminates from the baby monitor and electric heater, so when I first enter I can’t see a thing. I can hear, though, and smell. That heady newborn fragrance is long-gone, of course, replaced with the individual mix of scents all people have and which I’ve learnt to love this past 15 months. But it’s the sound of breathing that I really want to hear. Those reassuring snuffles, breaths and snores that tell me they’re OK.

Sometimes I’m only quick, hovering inside the door just long enough to be sure I’ve caught the sound of breathing from three different directions, while other times I linger longer, wait for any disturbance caused by the burst of light as their door was briefly open to fade away, allow my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.

I find myself reaching out to touch each one in turn, to reassure myself that they’re there in the darkness. As my eyes adjust, the sillouette of a body forms, outlined against the white of their bedsheet, and I dare to put a hand upon a little body, risk waking up whoever lies there and shattering the silence. But I have to. I need to feel her breathing so I lay my palm on a back or chest until I’m sure I’ve felt movement.

What am I checking? Although too horrible to normally admit it to myself, I guess I’m checking that my little girls are still breathing, perhaps because of some anxiety left over from those worrying days of J’s pregnancy when we were bombarded with warnings of the many, many risks we faced. Or perhaps it’s just the morbid disquiet that affects all parents to one degree or another.

On a deeper level, this nightly check is something more essential. I’m checking that these three, little girls exist; affirming the reality of my life. This new life sometimes seems just so unreal. Not many men become a father of three with so little time to prepare. It’s still all sinking in.

An irrational part of me worries that I’m tempting Fate when I slip into their bedroom each night, that somehow by checking that my girls are safe I’ll encourage the very dangers that scare me. Which makes me want to stay longer, as if somehow they are safer with me in the room than just a couple of rooms away, and sometimes I do. Sitting down on the floor, I’ll listen to three patterns of heavy, slow breathing intermingle. I’ll let my thoughts wander. What are they dreaming? What have they learnt today? Do they think of tomorrow? Who are they? What will they be?

We slept away a few weeks ago, J’s parents babysitting overnight so we could go to a wedding, and, as I lay in bed that night I asked J if she thought the girls would be OK. Of course, she told me, and reassured me that we would have been called if we were needed, that their grandparents would take every care with the grandchildren they loved so much. But that wasn’t what I meant. As I drifted off to sleep myself I asked another question.

“But what if they need their mum or dad?”

As promised, here’s some pictures of my girls playing with their dolls. Evie is definitely the most taken with them which is interesting, as from an early age J thought she would be particularly kind. She likes cuddles most, was the first to kiss, is the most likely to be cuddling a teddy when we go in to the nursery to wake her and her sisters.

I took this ne while she was playing quietly with Jem’s doll, the little boy. As he sisters romped noisily around the room, she’d taken the doll and sat queitly out of the way.

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And here Evie has Scarlett’s doll, and is feeding her with the toy bottle that came with here. Unfortunately, the bottle has ‘disappeared’ after Evie took to toddling around with it in her mouth and terrifying her parents that she’d fall and hurt herself with it.

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And here’s Jem. She shows the least interest in the dolls now the initial excitement has worn off, preferring toys that you can climb on, rattle, shake or bang togather.

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And this is Lettie taking a bite out of her dolly’s hand. Not the kindest thing to be doing but definitely better than biting her sisters.

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It regularly astonishes me how much my girls are capable of communicating. Their vocabulary is so small, the words thay can speak remaining limited to different variations on the Ba, Da, Ga, Ma and Na they learnt several months ago. Not much to work with you might think, but they get by remarkably well.

Take Ba words, for example. “Bearbear” is teddybear, “ba!” is “ta” (as in thank you, or, perhaps more accurately, “here you go” -the girls are copying me asking for things and haven’t quite conceptualised that thay should say ta when they want things rather than when giving), “baybay” is doll, “mmm-ba!” means kiss, “bee” means “beep” (the noise I make when playing the I’m-a-gonna-beep-your-nose game,) and then, of course, there’s “banana” (or “barara” or “bamama” – they still haven’t quite nailed that one down).

One of the first things I read about multiples was that they tend to acquire language later than singletons. Being one of two, three or more not only means there’s less impetus to make themselves understood but they also receive less individual attention. If I’m honest, I have to admit that while I have always been prepared for them to pick up language a little later than others their age, I’ve also never quite been able to escape every father’s illusion – that my children will, of course, be very advanced for their age (multiple birth or not).

So it’s good to remind myself that I shouldn’t allow my own competitiveness to cloud my expectations for my children. Being advanced for your age is just as much of an illusion, after all. Kids develop in leaps and starts and no snapshot is going to tell you anything meaningful. And besides, what difference does it really make what your child learns and when? What matters is that they are safe and loved, and trust those facts enough to be confident, happy and kind.

Plus, there’s more to communicating than words. The girls have developed several mimes, from such generally useful things as asking for something they want, letting me know they’re thirsty or pointing out exciting dogs in the park to such specific requests as that I sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to them (they just do one of the actions and look up at me expectantly), and between those and the words they know (and the many more they understand), we get along just fine.

I guess I’m also secretly hoping that they might develop a secret language. I’ve always found the idea fascinating and would love to not only watch them form their own lexicon but hopefully understand, too. On the other hand, I also worry that they will – it might lead to them isolating themselves from other kids and set back learning English properly – so, as cute and as interesting as it would be, I try not to encourage mistakes they make (”bearbear” instead just “bear” for teddybear, for example) so I doubt it will happen.

I guess it all comes down, just like so many other things in parenthood, to allowing your children the space to grow at their own pace. It can be hard sometimes to just stand at the sidelines cheering when you care so much but I guess that’s just the lot of a Number One Fan.

I bought the girls their first dolls the other day, nipping out to Toys R Us during my lunch.

I’m generally not too keen on gender-specific toys but, apparently, every time they go to play group, all three head straight for the baby dolls and spend much of the time cuddling them and carrying them round which just sounded too cute to miss out on. And besdies, I spent my entire childhood shooting or hacking at everything in site with toy guns and swords and I assume my girls will have inherited at least some of my contrariness.

After an initial period of confusion as I wandered the girls’ toys isles bewildered by the difference between the gazillion dolls they sell – rather like lingerie shopping, I thought; I mean, how many different types of pants do you women need? – I managed to figure out that, thankfully, the vast majority of the dolls for sale weren’t suitable for one-year olds, posessing as they did all manner of chokable accessories, strangulable ribbons, smotherable hairdos and the like. And of those that were suitable, all were black.

Until that moment, I’d not really looked at the skin colour of the dolls Toys R Us sold but stepping back to take it in, I was startled by the plastic apartheid I was witnessing. All the white dolls came not only with accessories – car seats, outfits, pushchairs, prams – but were in possession all manner of interesting talents – they cried, moved, weed, had beautiful hair – while the black dolls didn’t even come in boxes and were just piled haphazardly on one end of a shelf.

I wanted three different dolls, though, and the heap of black babies only had a boy and a girl so I had to go back to loking at the others, eventually finding a single white doll that was suitable for under threes – a girl in a car seat – which I bought along with the black boy and girl.

And the girls were thrilled. Too thrilled, perhaps, as I made the mistake of giving them their present when I got in from work which meant none of them wanted to go to bed.

It was amazing. I never knew children so young were capable of make believe. Evie, in particular, as well as rocking her doll, pretends to feed it while making slurping noises and puts it in the car seat which I’ve placed in the quad bike she got for Christmas before pushing it around the front room. Of course, she also pokes it in the eye and drops it on it’s head which I’m pretty sure she can’t have picked up from me.

It’s so cute to see them cradling their dollies, glistening patches on their plastic foreheads form the kisses they’ve been given, or to cuddle one of my children while she cuddles her own little baby. Knowing they can give affection like that really warms my heart, reassures me that, despite my attention being split three ways, I’ve been able to teach them what it is to be loved.

Arms outstretched they lurch towards me, grasping, hungry. Their legs jerk stiffly as they walk, threatening to send them toppling to the floor. But they don’t collapse, they just keep coming – three of them – cornering me. Can’t anything stop them?

One of them lets out a gurgle, white liquid dribbles from its mouth. It’s chewing something. I shudder, try not to think what it might be. An incomprehensible groan escapes the second, “Brrrrrraaannnaaaaaa…”. My god, what did it say? Brains?

The third one screams and lurches forward, its sudden speed surprising me. I turn, scan for an exit, dodge out of reach. But I’m tiring. Can’t run forever.

And still they keep coming, determined intelligence filling staring eyes that follow my every move.

My back hits a cupboard. There’s no escape. I’m cornered.

So I give up and share the last banana.