Triple the fun

"You've got your hands full." As people have said this a million times to me in the last 16 months I have given it much thought. Do you think that I could find any parent of toddlers or even one single toddler who doesn't think their hands are full? I have had a theory for a long time that life with baby or babies is just like having a purse. You know that no matter how big a purse you buy you will fill it to the brim with crap. Suddenly you need one of those tissue packs, an extra pencil, perhaps a note book or a small book to reed if you get stuck in line, a little extra make up for touch ups and so on. If you had a clutch, you'd be fine with an id, lipstick, credit card and a few dollars.

Well having kids in your life is similar, if sort of the opposite way. If you have one kid you find that there are a million things you need to do for them. You will spend every waking second chopping food for home made baby food, sterilizing equipment repeatedly, plotting graphs of diapers and bottles, and staring into their eyes lovingly. If you have three infants at once you economize your time. Your infants are lucky if they get some rocking, one nap on your chest, a clean spoon in their mouth, and organic food processed by a corporation. You just have to adjust or you can't survive.

If you try to do everything for triplets you would fall down dead. So, triplets seem to adjust, they get used to soothing themselves sometimes, spend a lot of time in swings or bouncy chairs while someone else has a 'greater need,' and share every single cold with one another because of shared spoons. Now, do they suffer for this? I don't know. Because I believe most parents with more than one kid will admit that child #2 got less stuff and attention than child #1. "First child syndrome" which I have heard it called, means the first child sleeps in your bed until they're 2, rarely touches the floor for being held so much, is practically attached to you by the umbilical cord still. Child #2 gets less partly because you have to spend time with #1 as well but also because the novelty has worn off. It's not the first baby smell, the first co-sleeper, the first burp. So, do triplets suffer for never having been an only child? I suppose not more than second children suffer. But we won't find out until therapy begins.