My Diary of Triplet Fatherhood

Sorry for the long gap in posting. We moved house recently and due to phone company red tape I’ve been without my umbilical cord to the internet for almost a month now (and still a week or two to go!).

It’s most unsettling.

Evie, Scarlett and Jem are also unsettled. We made a mistake on the day we moved in not bringing them to the new house until just before bedtime so they had been out all day in a strange house with their nannas, then only had half an hour in their new house before bed which proved to be exactly the amount of time it takes to get three fifteen month old girls thoroughly overexcited.

That first night Scarlett was awake for hours. Poor thing. The second strange bedroom in a day really trouled her and she’s still not fully recovered almost three weeks later. Those first few night all the girls would wake up and stand against the bars of their cots, eyes wide and tear-filled in the half light of their new room, wailing their distress at the unfamiliar environment. It was horrible. See, for all the wonderfullness of being a dad to triplets, there is one, inescapable downside: I can’t hold them all at once. Nowadays, in fact, even holding just two of my girls for any length of time is becoming impossible, so as they cried in the darkness, we had to move between them, comforting each in turn then leaving them to cry again.

Nights are better now but Scarlett continues to wake up early from her lunchtime nap and I can’t help wondering if she’ll ever return to the happy routine she was in before.

Anyway, setting aside sleeplessness, it’s such a relief to have moved. No more carrying the girls up a flight of stairs every time we need to move from one room to the next, no more three flights of stairs between kitchen and nursery, no more building barracades around the cooker when the oven is on. Now we have a seperate kitchen with a gate keeping the girls safely in the connected dining room where they can toddle around happily without setting their parents’ danger-sense tingling.

At least now they toddle around happily. At first all three would stand at the gate and cry, occassionally throwing toys into the kitchen to highlight their outrage at being cut off from their parents (or maybe they just missed the thrill of dicing with danger, I don’t know).

It was hard to know what to do except keep things as normal as possible, be there to give comfort and wait for the change to seem normal. At their age, the house you live in makes up your entire world. Without warning everything they held familiar was snatched away and replaced by a foreign world with strange features: a nursery where their cots aren’t squeezed comfortingly together, different stairs, rooms they can see but can’t go in, no playhouse in the front room. Fortunately, at their age, memories are also short. I wonder if they even remember their old house now as they slowly but steadily set about exploring, playing in and generally leaving their mark on (read: trashing) this new one.

And we still have one surprise left to spring. We have a garden now and as soon as both the weather and their ability to not fall flat on their faces on the concrete path (as happened with our one, abortive attempt at letting them out there – Scarlett’s bust lip has only just gone down) have improved, they’ll have one thing that was never available before: the chance to play outside. Already their playhouse sits tantilisingly on the lawn and if the triple swings on their Christmas list materialize, there’ll be another world for them to explore (and trash) come springtime.