My Diary of Triplet Fatherhood

I was astonished when Scarlett first started responding to “so big”. Janet had originally taught the game to Jem. She’d ask, “How big are you Jemima?”, before throwing both arms up and adding, “Are you… SO BIG?”, to which Jem would throw her own arms up and grin at the praise that copying her mum brought on.

Soon So Big joined the other copying games we play: clapping, banging highchair trays, bathwater splashing, red indian warcries, peekaboo, whatever doing that wibbly thing on your lips with your fingers is called.

Only, last week I noticed that Scarlett no longer needs me to throw my arms up first. Just the question, “How big are you?” is enough for her to know what game we’re playing. She throws up her chubby, little arms and waits for me to do it too. Which, of course I do, grinning stupidly as I swell with pride at her cleverness.

It makes me wonder what other things we she understands and feel rather sad that we never had time to pursue baby signing.

In case you don’t know, baby signing is an astonishing new discovery – that even as young as six months old, babies can communicate their needs, desires and experiences through sign language. At a stage when even babbling is barely starting, children can be talking. How wonderful to not have to go through the trial and error of working out what a child needs. Hungry? Thirsty? Cuddle? Nappy? More? Less? All these things are communicable months before vocal chords have been put into action. And it’s more than just needs. Coming home from work, my friend Al tells me his daughter relates the things she’s done during here day. That she saw two cats in a tree or other things impressive to a one year old.

Only, when you have three babies there’s not so much time to stop and pause before every action so you can perform the accompanying sign. We tried for a bit. The first signs you are supposed to teach are “milk” and “food”, adding more as those start to be repeated back. Except during triplet mealtimes you have none of a singleton’s pauses while baby chews and rests. Even as each spoonful is delivered, another baby is waiting. Besides, I’m not sure where the spare hand you’re meant to use for the signs is supposed to come from. What with bowls, spoons, picking up dropped finger food, offering bottles and wiping up spillages, even two is half the hands you really need.

Which is why the beginnings of verbal communication excite me so. I can’t wait to talk to my kids. Even when they were tiny, I’d sometimes lie next to them, trying to follow their eyes, listening to their breathing, sensing the pace of their movements, wondering just what was going on behind those little eyes that had never seen the world before.

Soon, perhaps, I’ll know.

Ah, that ‘first day back at work’ feeling. The desk, the demands, the lack of daylight; the doldrums. All the fun I’ve had over the last week makes it all seem so unpleasant despite the fact that I actually like my job quite a lot.

We went to Llandudno, in North Wales for a week; our first family holiday, booked into a self-catering holiday cottage in a village just outside town.

I’m rather fond of old-fashioned seaside towns so I knew it would be good… if only the girls would sleep. Their not being able todrop off in unfamiliar surroundings or too-light rooms spurring them to wake up early have put a dampner on several of our attempts at visiting relatives over the last year so I was nervous that we were condemning us (and them) to a week of grumpy, over-tired babies.

But I needn’t have worried. They slept fine and the holiday was lovely. Ironically, in fact, the only time our holiday wasn’t lovely was the day we went to Bangor. The girls were getting hungry as we made our way to Caernarvon (I wanted to see the castle) so we pulled off at the first place we saw – Bangor – but despite looking for something better, ended up picknicking in a fag-butt-strewn square in the company of three winos and a crowd of rowdy teenagers. There was hardly any dog poo and broken glass on the grass, however, and the public toilet had needle bins so I didn’t have that to worry about when I put the girls down on their blanket, so it wasn’t all bad. Plus, Caernarvon seemed positively idyllic in comparison.

Bangor aside, though, we managed to do lots of stuff, despite still sticking to The Routine (although whether it’s the kids or us who have been institutionalised by Gina Ford’s methods, I’m really not sure any more). We went out every morning and afternoon, returning to our cottage by one so the girls could sleep for a couple of hours, and again by six so we could throw them (not literally) in the bath. We managed to visit the beach several times, a paddling pool, a few parks (wherever we saw three baby swings, in fact), several nearby towns, and, most afternoons, Forte’s Ice Cream Parlour in Llandudno (because they had three highchairs, of course – the knickerbocker glories were merely a pleasant addition).

The only other things that weren’t so lovely were Evie deciding to depth charge the shared bath three nights in a row and the fact that all three girls have developed an acute interest in dropping things to see where they end up. Although, in the first instance, it was her sisters who took the brunt of her evacuations and in the second, whichever poor waitress ended up cleaning the floor round our table whenever we ate out.

Another thing I’d been a little worried about was how it holidaying with small children would compare to previous holidays J and I had had. With the girls going to bed at seven, there was to be no chance of having any nights on the town (if that’s even possible in Llandudno – I’m 31 and the next youngest person must have been twice my age) and, really, very little opportunity to laze around in the sunshine. The girls find being in their buggy frustrating now they can crawl and coast around but, once they are loose, the constant tingling of my parental danger sense means relaxation is out of the question.

Again, though, I needn’t have worried. Our days were so full, and Evie, Lettie and Jem so much fun to be around, that by seven o’clock I’d had more excitement and fun than any night out and I was happy to do my lazing in the evenings, chatting, reading, playing games and eating fine foods we’d collected as we passed butchers, delis and cheese and wine shops during the day.

J’s parents came down for the last night. It was her birthday, they hadn’t seen their grandtriplets for two weeks and they deserved a rest after painting our lounge when we were away (ready for us putting our wholly un-triplet-friendly house on the market). They love the girls so much. It made a great finale to the holiday to see three generations so happpy together.

It’s just a shame I have to wait until next year until we can do it again.

Oh, and if you’d like to see pictures,they’re on my Google gallery (the pics are numbered by who they show, left to right, Evie, Scarlett or Jem).

It started on Monday morning. J’s alarm hadn’t gone off (it was my turn to lie in, if you can call 7.30 a lie in) so we both rushed to get the girls up.

The smell of puke hit us as soon as we opened the door to the nursery. It had been a swelteringly hot night and the room seemed almost humid with sick. Both Scarlett and Jem were lying in pools of the stuff, Scarlett starting to groggily stretch as she woke but Jem motionless. My heart hammered up to my throat as I saw her lying there, not moving. Was she OK? Was she… Then she opened her eyes, and made a tiny moaning noise, her mouth downcast. And I could breath again.

Between J and I, we set to, cleaning up the girls, the mattresses, the floor and their clothes, in what, over the last few days, would become a familiar routine (varied only when diarrhea began entered the picture a few hours later), eventually getting everything (and everyone) straightened out in time to get to a doctor’s appointment first thing.

Jem and Lettie failed to perk up at all as we waited for the appointment time and no one would eat breakfast. They’re usually so bouncy in the mornings but on Monday they just lay there on the floor, moaning or sucking their thumbs for comfort. It’s heart-breaking to see them feeling so confused and sorry for themselves.

Reasons for their sickness ran through my mind. Had I let their room get too hot? Was it something we’d fed them (or they’d fed themselves while we weren’t looking)? Each scenario plagued me with a different cause for guilt as I wondered how they’d become so ill. But in the end, it seems their illness wasn’t my fault. They’ve caught a viral infection. Presumably the same one a friend of ours (you know who you are!) was recovering from when we went to a barbeque at their house on Saturday.

Yesterday, Jem and Lettie were a little improved – I even managed to coax a few giggles by wafting them with a sheet I was getting out of the wash for the second time that day – but Evie had come down with the virus, too, by then. As had J, leaving me to play Fergus Nightingale to the whole family.

And today not much has changed. J is a little better, and I dared to take the girls out fo the house for the first time in days as no one had been sick since Evie in the night. I just hope everyone’s recovered in time for us to go on holiday on Saturday… or that I haven’t succumbed.

And another:

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“You too!”

“Stop, Evie!”

“Even higher!”

“Forgot gate!”

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.

Possibly the most engaging part of having three young children, I find, is how infectious their curiosity is. For them, the world is brand new. Every object is a mystery to be unravelled; every space is a virgin landscape to explore.

What else, really, is baby-proofing, if not forcing yourself to get down on hands and knees and see a room through the eyes of a voracious hunter of new experiences. And how telling that it’s so hard to see all the dangers, to span the two worldviews, applying grown-up knowledge of consequence and danger to one guided by possibility and fearlessness. In a way it makes me jealous, to know that my mind won’t ever be a blank canvas again.

Tonight, Evie spent a good fifteen minutes poking my front teeth. Over and over again, she applied a single index finger with all the earnest curiosity of someone searching for the kind of secret door commonly found in stately homes, her furrowed brow seeming to say that, sure, the last twenty pokes might have found these things to be merely white and slippery but there’s got to be a hidden catch somewhere… perhaps if I poke… just… here? Nope. Well, perhaps… here? Or… here? And so on. I’ve no idea what she expected might happen but I rather wish I could have done something surprising to reward the effort she put in. Unfortunately I don’t know any tooth tricks.

I should probably count myself lucky that she was only poking, really. The girls’ explorations aren’t always so gentle. With every toy becoming a potential danger in the hands of someone who’s three main means of investigation are the gentle prod, the cautious bite, and whacking her nearest sister with the object at full force, you learn to count yourself lucky when merely prodded. Which is why, incidently, every new gift is now screened in case it needs to be placed in the “supervised play only” box we keep for anything heavy, hard or otherwise dangerous when applied at great speed to the nose.

Home life is great at the moment. The long period of illness between February and April seems a distant memory, the weather is warm, I have more time than ever to spend at home and my girls are a pleasure to be around. Not only are they almost entirely good natured and happy but it’s almost impossible not to be infected by the active interest they’re all taking in the world.

To commemorate how nice this period is, here’s a few random photos that, hopefully, give a sense of what life with three active, healthy little girls is like.

Here’s Evie, kindly cleaning Scarlett’s teeth. Attempting to anyway. At least she wasn’t whacking her sister too hard this time.

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And Evie, again, playing with the stacking cups they all love. Of course, stacking is something of a misnomer in their case, whacking-and-scattering-into-every-corner-of-the-house cups might be a better name (although not quite so catchy, admittedly).

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Here’s Jemima, proud at having dashed across the floor and retrieved an interesting cube in record time.

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And Scarlett, having dashed across the floor in record time… got stuck. Poor thing. Unfortunately, neither her nor her sisters has quite figured out about going round obstacles. The day before this was taken, I found her underneath a kitchen chair, arms and legs pumping as she tried to reach a toy on the other side, but getting nowhere as her forehead was against the crossbeam between the chair’s legs.

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And here’s me, Evie and Lettie, caught playing “flying cars” instead of doing the morning feed. Oops.

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Who’s playing wth my shoelaces? Jem was somewhere above my head last time I looked up from the board book I’m reading to Evie, but she was playing on her toy piano then and the discordant clang of her launching herself at all four keys together stopped a few seconds ago. With the speed she moves nowadays, she could be anywhere.

A slender finger begins to carefully intrude into my ear hole and pause to see who’s taking such an interest in my orifice. “Anything interesting in there?” I ask, turning to see… Scarlett (It takes me a moment to figure out who’s doing the exploring from such close range). Apparently not. She squawks once, nearly shattering my eardrum, and rolls off in search of other entertainment.

Which means, I realise as I turn back to Evie, that it must be Jem who is at my feet. Was at my feet, I should say, as my foot no longer registers any tugging. I don’t have long to wonder where Jem might be, however, as Evie is suddenly screaming in protest (right next to my other ear – ouch!). The facts that Evie can’t crawl yet, isn’t quite so strong as her sisters and Jemima has all the single-minded unstoppability of a steam train when she sets her sights on a destination means that this is an increasingly common situation, having to rescue Evie from being trapped under her sister, arms and legs pumping methodically as she tries to traverse the obstacle in her path.

I sweep them both up in my arms and they instantly forget their collision, squeeking with excitement instead. I roll sideways and there find Scarlett has come to investigate the rumpus. A raspberry on her neck has her squeeling, too, and I’m happy as I’ve ever been.

Looking over some of the older photos I’ve posted here, I find myself struck with nostalgia. Evie, Lettie and Jem have changed so much since they first arrived in my life. I can still carry two in my arms at once but not three and not for any length of time without becoming tired. They have teeth now and, as they crawl, a little of their chubbiness is falling away. Their hair is thicker.

The real difference, however, is in how they act. Leaving the room for two minutes yesterday I was surprised that, for the first time in months, they hadn’t moved. Usually, they’re in constant motion, rolling, commando-style crawling, or, in the case of Jemima, sliding along on the back of her head, to investigate anything and everything within reach. They’ve switched from passivity to taking a very active interest in the world and while that’s fascinating to be part of, it’s also the beginning of the long road to independence.

I feel nostalgic not only for the quiet awestruck newness of their first arrival but I also , for the first time, I feel a little nostalgic regret for their growing up. I love how things are now, just as I loved how things were three months ago and three months before that. But those three girls aren’t stopping for anyone and I want to treasure every moment of our journey together.

I even find myself experiencing a kind or premature nostalgia for things yet to come. Each girl I see in the street makes me wonder how my own girls will be at that age. One girl I saw, probably 17 or 18, driving through Leeds in a brand new Clio, two friends in with her, all obviously relishing how grown up it felt to be cruising in the summer sunshine, made me particularly vertiginous. One day my girls would be there, on the cusp of leaving home, childhood passed and with it the dependence of youth. I imagined these moments I treasure becoming sparser, limited to trips home and holidays and felt, for a moment, terribly sad for my future loss.

I find something similar with younger children, too. I watch kids playing with their parents in the park, being walked to school, older kids going to school alone or out with their friends, and I wonder about my own children at such an age. How they will be, how our relationships will have changed, how I will feel.

The things I want for them, to be happy, confident and interested in the world, are also the things that will allow them to make their own way in life. It’s so strange, to be a parent: to love someone so much that you devote everything to preparing them to be able to leave you.

Perhaps the best thing is to concentrate on the here and now. Right now I’m happy, my children are beautiful and fascinating, I have more time than ever to spend with J and them as a family. And while, sure, all this will have changed before long, it hasn’t changed now and whatever happens, I’ll never lose these memories.

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Sorry to have kept anyone waiting anyone who was wondering if I’d survived my weekend of solo triplet-wrangling. I did, and with an emergency biscuit to spare (although not for long – turns out it was a celebration biscuit, too).

Anyway, these last couple of weeks have been amazing. All three girls seem to be going through a period of accelerated learning. First Jemima crawled slowly, then Scarlett did, too. A few days later, Jem also managed to sit up, while both her and Scarlett are becoming progressively faster in their crawling. At the same time, Scarlett managed to master both “mama” and “dada”, while Evie started to say “mama” (Jemima, by the way, only says “dada” – hopefully they’re not taking sides), and both Scarlett and Evie have begun to be able to mimic me and J. Scarlett having woken up early one lunchtime, J managed to teach her to wave. It’s so cute and I find myself waving to her long periods. Meanwhile I taught Evie to make a red indian warcry by patting my hand on her mouth as she shouts, which Scarlett has also picked up and even built upon doing the hand action herself. And Evie, being smaller than her sisters, is making up for being a little behind with strength by trailblazing the ability to feed herself. She’s picked up feeding herself soldiers of toast and boiled green beans while both her sisters are still using them to either crumble interestedly or scrunch into mush.

It’s like they’ve really woken up to the World around them and want to move around it, explore it, talk to people and interact with them. They are, in other words, starting to leave babyhood behind.

Now that I’m taking two mornings off a week, I get to really be part of all these developments. Although ti only adds up to one day, it seems that I have loads more time with the girls, which is wonderful. Not only does J get more support and sleep but I don’t have to cram all my quality time into a short weekend.

Every morning I’m off I take them to the swings which they’re only just big enough for but love all the same. Moving between the girls, swinging and playing with each one in turn, gets quite a lot of attention form other parents and kids but I don’t mind. I’m just happy to be there, enjoying the company of my kids and the summer sunshine.

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Roll on August when one day becomes two and a half!

Things got a little more complicated after the morning nap. Despite the rain, I decided to go for a walk round Kirkstall Abbey, and, two sodden turns round the grounds later, I had set off back home, a little late but nothing a little hurrying with making lunch wouldn’t make up for… only to find the Leeds Marathon filling the road dividing the Abbey (and us) from our house (and lunch).

Walking up to the crossing, I waited for the policeman manning it, on the opposite side of the road, to let us cross. “Not until there’s a gap”, was his response every time I made what-are-we-waiting-for mimes at him, a response that would hav seemed fair enough had the number of runners not been steadily increasing, the girls growing more and more fractious in the buggy and any chance of a gap diminishing seemingly in proportion to the chance of a three-baby meltdown occurring.

After a whole 15 minutes of waiting, I just crossed anyway, banking on the fact that arresting a man with three hungry babies for obstructing a major sporting event wouldn’t be worth the hassle.

Fortunately, it wasn’t.

Once home, I was just about getting things back on track when Scarlett, discovering a lump in her spaghetti bolognese, first started choking, then, just as I got near, puked her whole lunch over me, her, Jemima’s leg, their highchairs and the carpetted kitchen floor.

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Only one emergency biscuit left now.

I’m feeling quietly confident now; into the final stretch and still two emergency biscuits left.

I was only woken once last night… by J. I’d just drifted off to sleep when the phone rang and, once I remembered that the phone in the psare room is now in the cupboard, picked it up to hear Gary Barlow’s dulcet tones crooning out A Million Love Songs, together with what I assumed to be J’s voice whooping along excitedly every few seconds. Neither J nor Gary replied when I tried talking into the handset so I just listened until, a minute or so later, the phone went dead. I’d like to think the song was directed at me (by J, not Gary) but reckon it’s more likely that the phone was being waved in the air in time to the song and J just pressed the redial button by mistake.

One unfortunate side-effect of hearing Take That just before bed is that I have had their songs going round and round my head since 6am. Even singing breakfast-themed renditions to the girls this morning (Reheat My Porridge, A Million Spoonfuls, you get the idea) hasn’t shifted them.

Speaking of Evie, Lettie and Jem, they’re all in very good spirits today. I’ve been telling them there’s only two more sleeps until mummy’s home but I’m not entirely sure they’ve really noticed she’s gone. Evie’s been a little more clingy than usual but Jemima and Scarlett seem no less happy to roll about, play with toys and whack the kitchen cupboards or each other than on any other morning. Perhaps only when they see her will they realise what’s been missing these last few days.

This afternoon was lovely. Only one emergency biscuit needed, and that only to bouy me up in preparation of the last push. No crying, no refusal to eat, no heart-stopping dangers, just lots of messing about and fun.

Rain did come in the end so my planned return trip to the swings had to be abandoned in favour of a visit to Morrisons where the girls, as usual, attracted plenty of attention. Not that I minded. Looking after them single-handed made me somehow more proud of them today. Plus I was told that I was a wonderful husband by one old lady and the perfect man by another for looking after the girls all weekend which isn’t something you hear every day (every other day, maybe…).

I’m off to bed now. There’s still a lot more of the weekend left and I’m already feeling quite tired from the demands of uninterrupted triplet childcare.

So far so good. I have only had to eat one of the four emergency biscuits I have squirrelled away to help with shock or stress. The girls are all – scratch that, two out of three girls – are all sleeping.

It’s been very pleasant today. I managed to get eveyone out for a trip to the swings this morning. Fortunately, the weather reports have turned out to be wrong so instead of torrential rain, it’s lovely and sunny again. If the weather holds, I think a trip to the park may be in order later on.

Jem had a little bit of a temperature earlier, too, but the quick application of Calpol seems to have done the job. She’s cutting a front tooth so I expect it was just that.

I had a brief fright when Scarlett, still pursuing an apparent deathwish, was sucking on the plug socket when I came back from a brief bathroom break. Only when I snatched her away did I remember that we fitted socket protectors last week. Only the quick application of a chocolate biscuit helped me get over the shock.

Otherwise, things have been great, Scarlett even saying dada for the first time before breakfast. She said it to the fridge, mind, but I’m still quite excited. Come to think of it, though, when she said mama for the first time, earlier in the week, that was also addressed to the fridge. How very confused she must be.

It’s 6.30 and the first night has passed with little incident. I can hear Scarlett singing to her sisters in the nursery where all three are unswaddled in their cots. I wonder is she’s singing about how she got a special cuddle back to sleep from Daddy at 3am?

Just one wakening’s not too bad between three little girls. I went to bed early, too, so feel reasonably fresh.

Will post another update at lunchtime, hopefully. I have to unplug the network cable while the girls are downstairs now because J found Scarlett with it pulled out from under the rug and wrapped around her neck yesterday. Sounds terrifying.

The girls are asleep and this first small chunk of home alone time has been, I’d say, pretty successful except for a brief blip at the beginning that had e worried.

I think J making quite a big deal about saying goodbye, waving at the window, etc., while well intentioned, may not have been a great idea. As soon as the girls realised she wasn’t going to pop her head back up at the window again, first Evie, then all three burst into floods of tears. The poor things were distraught.

And no sooner had I calmed them down than I made a mistake myself. They’d finished their cauliflower cheese so I got a tub of brocolli out. Except, I only remembered three screwed up faces and another round of tears later J telling me that the only thing they don’t like is brocolli and she has to mix it with other food to hide the taste. Whoops.

Quickly switching to their favourite, bananas, milk and baby rice, I managed to calm the storm again and got to bedtime without an more untoward events. At bedtime, however, Evie, unusually for her, wouldn’t settle and I had to go up twice to cuddle her back into a calm state. I presume it can’t have been my perhaps ill-chosen bedtime poem, Disobedience, and she wasn”t hungry or thirsty.

Perhaps she misses J. I hope not. Forty eight hours are a long time in a nine-month old’s life.