Wednesday, June 24, 2009

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.

4 comments:

  1. So true, so true. I find that I sometimes feel guilty for all the things my trio is "missing out on". But then I remember that if they don't know any different, they aren't "missing" anything. Life is what it is, and they adapt, right? Right??

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  2. Love this post. And it is so true. I hope to be a new parent some day soon and I am sure you enjoy every minute of "having your hands full"!

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  3. Really agree with this message! Stopping by from SITS to Say Hi!

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  4. Here is a story.
    I have triplet cousins (nearly 25 yr old men)...they have been asked time & time again "What's it like being a triplet?" They find this hard to answer because they've never known anything else... I'm sure they'd like to respond with "what's it like being a singleton?"
    Then they grew and went away to college (or the military, or both)... and NOW if you ask them "what's it like being a triplet?" they would tell you...
    "It's like mozzerella sticks!"
    huh?
    "Because if you ate them every day, every meal, all the time - they wouldn't be special. You would grow tired of them, not like them so much. BUT when you only get them every once in awhile, a treat at a restaurant maybe 4-6 times a year - they're REALLY GOOD! And it's special and exciting and awesome!"

    So I wouldn't say they "suffered" for being triplets, they just didn't think it was as cool as other people thought it was. UNTIL they grew up and parted ways - and now they are proud be say they are triplets, and genuinely love spending time together on those occasions.
    ...oh, and ever since then, everytime I eat mozzerella cheese sticks, I say "these are so good, it's like being a triplet!"

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