Looking Back

I found a journal that I kept when I was in the hospital on bed rest before the boys were born.  I was reading through it this morning and found a rather interesting excerpt.  It's a letter to my boys.  In it, I describe their personalities in utero.  Some of it (the bold print), is pretty spot on.

June 29, 2013

To my precious little boys -

Mommy has been in the hospital now for almost 3 weeks.  We've been monitoring your heart rates every 4 hours to make sure you're all doing okay.  So far, you have all done very well.  The doctors and nurses (and of course Mommy and Daddy) have been really impressed.  We've started to see some of your personalities come out during the monitoring sessions.  I'm curious if you will have similar habits after you're born.  Time will tell.

Baby A (later known as Oliver) - The nurses like you a lot.  You're always the easiest to get on the monitor. We know exactly where to find you...way down low.  You don't seem to give us much trouble except for when you have the occasional heart deceleration.  This causes us to have to stay on the monitor extra long and makes Mommy a little nervous, but everyone has assured us that you're doing just fine!

Baby B (later known as Nolan) - In the beginning, I thought you were the calm one.  Lately though, you've been a little feisty.  You and Baby C like to play games with the nurses.  You two make it very difficult for them to find you on the monitor.  You're constantly moving.  Lately you've been hanging out on my far right side.

Baby C - I think you might be the most active out of all your brothers.  I have the feeling you're going to keep us very busy!  You tend to get the hiccups a lot (just like your brother, Baby A).  I think it's pretty cute, though it also makes me feel bad for you.  I hope they don't make you too uncomfortable.

I'm very excited to get to meet the three of you, but I hope you'll wait a few more weeks before you make your big debut.  Keep growing!

Love you all!
Mama

Father's Day

James did a nice job of making me feel special on Mother's Day, so it was really important to me to be sure he had a nice Father's Day.  We started the morning giving the boys their bottles then I made breakfast (pancakes and bacon).  I gave him his gifts (a couple polo shirts, a framed DAD picture of the boys, and a slideshow I put together of him and the boys).  I think it was a good mix of practical and sentimental.

The biggest part of the day was that we went out to dinner as a family...all five of us.  AND it went really well!  We were very fortunate to be on the receiving end of a random act of kindness.  Someone mailed us three restaurant/Visa gift cards.  We were able to use them to go to dinner at Longhorn Steakhouse.  We called ahead to find out when their off peak time was and to check to see if they could accommodate all three of our babies.  We got there at 3:30 and were surprised at how busy it was.  But since we had called ahead, our table was ready for us with three high chairs.  James and I managed to carry all three boys in without too much trouble.  He had Oliver and Lucas.  I had Nolan and the diaper bag.  We definitely attracted some attention, but all the comments we heard were very positive.  The boys were on their best behavior and we didn't have any meltdowns.  In fact, they were so good that we were even able to order dessert after we ate (all) our dinner!  It was kind of a Father's Day miracle.  We paid our tab and got everything cleaned up and packed up and went on our merry way.  I'd be lying if I said we didn't do a little fist bump when we got into the car.  We did it!  Turns out sometimes we kind of rock this triplet parent thing.

Trying New Foods

We are finally eating table foods!  We started Ollie a couple months ago as he was starting to get a little bored with purees.  The other two boys didn't even have any interest in puffs (which literally dissolve in 2 seconds) let alone anything they actually had to chew.  They both would gag anytime we would offer something new to them, so we kind of backed off.  Then Nolan started to come around, but Lucas would still gag on everything, and oftentimes even throw up.  I was starting to get concerned that he'd be eating baby food forever.

But now...we're finally there.  Not only are the boys happy to try all kinds of new things, but they're becoming great self feeders (with finger foods...Mommy doesn't trust them with a spoon yet).  Again, Oliver and Nolan got the hang of this a while ago, but it's taken Lucas some time.  I'm so proud of all three of my big boys!

Here are some of the new foods we've been trying (I'm mostly compiling this list so I can look back on it when I need meal ideas):

Breakfast:
Yogurt
Bananas
Peaches
Pancakes
Waffles
Toast
Scrambled Egg Yolks
Cheerios
Oatmeal

Lunch/Dinner:
Grilled Cheese
Quesadillas
Mushroom Chicken
Chicken and Biscuits
Mac and Cheese
Tuna Helper
Mashed Potatoes
Coucous
Cheese
Cottage Cheese
Bread
Black Beans
Chick Peas
Avocado

Snacks:
Ritz Crackers
Cheez-its
Cheerios
Veggie Puffs
Popsicles

Everyone seems to be a huge fan of grilled cheese, quesadillas, any kind of chicken, and bread.  Ollie had a phase where he spit almost everything out, but I think he's decided food is good and doesn't do that anymore.  So far avocados and popsicles were the only things that left them with disgusted faces, which is funny.  What kids don't like popsicles?  My guess is the extreme cold is just too much for them.

Ollie spitting out his avocado

Nolan's avocado face

Lucas' avocado face (similar to Nolan's)

11 Months

I'm a little late in posting this, but our boys turned 11 months old on the 5th.  It's so hard to believe they'll be one in a matter of weeks.  I get so emotional thinking about how far we've come.  This time last year, I was on my third week of hospital bed rest...not knowing what was in store for my sons.  Now I have three happy and healthy boys.  And my heart just couldn't be fuller!

At 11 months, our boys are doing a lot.  They babble a lot.  They all say "dada" and Ollie also says "mama".  James doesn't think they know what they're saying, but I think they do.  We're all eating table food now...even Lucas, though he still tends to gag on a lot of things.  In terms of movement, they're still army crawling all over the place.  Every once in a while they'll crawl normally for about two seconds and then go back to their wounded soldier crawl.  I kind of think they'll always crawl like that...just because they're so efficient moving that way.  Nolan and Lucas are both pulling up on everything and Nolan is pretty steady on his feet.  It won't be long before he can stand up on his own without holding on to anything.  Then....walking!  Yikes!

Here's some of the boys' 11 month photos.  They're getting harder and harder to take because they always just want to crawl away!

"Mom, move out of the way...the TV is on!"

This is pretty much how our life is...

One way to guarantee they don't take off their stickers...

Cheese!

He's going to be our first walker

This sticker is delicious!

We Won!

If you regularly read this blog or are my Facebook (or real life) friend, you know that we recently entered a contest to win a year supply of diapers.  http://youandmeandourpreciousthree.blogspot.com/2014/05/vote-for-us.html

At the time, I didn't really think there was a chance of us winning.  I mean, I knew my babies really were the cutest babies but when it comes to contests like that where the winner is just the person with the most votes, it's really just a popularity contest.  Despite that, I did my best to get all my friends, family, and multiples groups to pull together to help me out.  I was so impressed with the amount of support we got from everyone.  Not only did lots of our friends and family vote, but they also shared the link on their pages to try and get votes from their friends as well.

On Friday, May 23rd KMBC Channel 9 News contacted us saying they wanted to do an interview and air our story to help us win.  http://youandmeandourpreciousthree.blogspot.com/2014/05/kmbc-channel-9-news-interview.html

Prior to the story airing, we were in the lead with just over 800 votes.  Within 24 hours of the story airing, we had gotten 350 more votes.  Surely we were going to win...right?  Well, maybe not.  The second place girl seemed to get a large surge of votes whenever we'd take the lead.  When we got those 350 votes after the news story was aired, she miraculously then got 400 votes in a matter of hours to take our lead.  Things were looking suspicious.

Soon people were pointing out red flags to me.  First off, I didn't realize you could track where the votes were coming from.  Someone directed me to this, which shows the distribution of votes for this girl.  https://bitly.com/QUBK1z+.  As you can see a majority of her votes are from Bangladesh and a very small percentage of them were linked from Facebook.  You could also see when she got her votes (hour by hour) and there were a number of times that she got very large amounts of votes in a very small frame of time.  It seemed pretty questionable.  I went to look at my vote distribution and it made a lot more sense. https://bitly.com/1mzP8EA+ .

Another friend pointed out to me that if you went to her profile page, her "About" section was filled with Vote Exchange groups.  I never even knew things like that existed before this contest.  Apparently you can exchange votes and even buy votes!  It was obvious from this girl's profile that she does contests like this often.

The third indicator that things were sketchy with this girl was that her photo had very little "likes" compared to how many votes she was getting.  In the end, we had over 2,000 votes, but over 3,000 likes.  She had nearly 3,000 votes but only 330 likes.  

Soon it was obvious to everyone that this girl was cheating.  And I was getting nervous.  What if she ended up winning and getting the prize over me?  It sucks not to win something, but to lose to someone who is playing dishonestly makes it that much harder to swallow.  I had friends contact the sponsor of the company to make them aware of what was going on.  They replied saying they were going to do voting audits on the contestants to make sure their votes were legit.  This made me feel better, but I was still nervous.

In the end, at 10:59 on Saturday, May 31st when the contest ended, I ended up with 2,292 votes.  The other girl had 2,628...almost 1,000 of which were obtained dishonestly in the last 24 hours of the contest.  I was bummed that we didn't end up with the most votes but was kind of holding out hope that the sponsor would disqualify the other girl and name me the winner.

The contest rules stated that the winner would be notified by email.  Those next couple days I checked my email constantly.  When I didn't see anything all day Sunday or Monday, I was convinced the other girl won.  And I was pretty bummed about it.  We really needed those diapers.  And we played fair.  It just wasn't right for her to win.

But then on Tuesday afternoon, I got this email:

My niece Monica was staying with us at the time, and I literally started screaming and jumping up and down.  I told all most closest friends and family right away and then the next day when I had had time to wrap my head around it, I got to post this on Facebook:

I know you all (like me) have been very eager for the winner of the diaper contest to be announced. As you probably know, we didn't end up with the most votes at the end of the contest due to the first place girl using questionable and dishonest voting tactics. Fortunately, LuckyVitamin.com doesn't condone that type of behavior and we were just notified that we are in fact the WINNERS of a year supply of diapers! I can't begin to express how grateful James Asher and I are to our friends, family, multiples community, Matthew DeSarle & KMBC 9 News Kansas City, and even people we don't know who supported us. It was so awesome to see everyone pull together to help our family. Thank you so much!

We ended up having 246 people "like" that status update and 17 people share it with their friends.  This whole thing has been an awesome experience.  Yes, we're thrilled about the prize...enough diapers and wipes to cover our babies' butts for 4 months (a year supply doesn't last as long when you have three).  It's a dream come true!  But what was even cooler was seeing everyone we know (and lots of people we don't know) come together to help out our family.  I wish I had a way of finding out exactly how many times our link was shared.  It was surely hundreds of times.  We are so very grateful for the support we've seen throughout all this.  It will be a fun story to share with our boys down the road.

Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose

Allow me to describe the morning I had. The boys were up around 6:15, which is pretty typical. I gave them their bottles and then let them play until breakfast, which is our usual routine. Around 8:30, I got the boys' breakfast ready and then started bringing them over to their high chairs. I usually do diaper changes after breakfast/before naps but do a quick sniff of the butt before putting them in their high chairs...just to make sure we're in the clear. I took Lucas over first. He didn't smell poopy, so I started buckling him in his chair...only to noticed he had poop all over his shirt. I checked his diaper again. Wasn't his.

So then I go over to Nolan and right away I can tell he was responsible. Talk about a blowout. Not only was it all over him and his clothes, but it was also all over Lucas and the carpet. I managed to get him changed and cleaned up and then put him in his high chair with some Cheerios to keep him happy. Then I moved on to changing Lucas out of his clothes and put him in his high chair. I then went for number three and OF COURSE, Ollie had had a blowout as well. Seriously?!? At this point, I'm thinking a good mom would give all these boys a bath...but they had just gotten baths last night and quite frankly I just didn't have it in me to bathe three boys by myself. So instead I used an entire package of wipes to clean them up.

 I finally got all three into their high chairs and ready to eat. I used the Cheerio distraction tactic long enough to get their clothes rinsed and the nasty carpet spot as clean as I could get it.

Now onto breakfast. I was hoping for a quiet calm meal, which is just hilarious that I thought this actually could happen. It's like they were working together to see how uncooperative and messy they could be. It went a little something like this:

I feed Ollie a bite of yogurt and fruit. He sticks his tongue out and spits it everywhere. This certainly isn't the first time he's done this. He thinks it's hilarious. I find it incredibly irritating. I tell him no and move on to Nolan. I feed him and he eats a couple bites like a good boy. Move on to Lucas. He closes his eyes, purses his lips shut, and shakes his head. He does this when he's done eating. Don't mind that he hasn't even started. So I go back to Nolan and feed him a bit more. He continues to eat well, but Ollie is getting mad that he's not being fed. So I give him a little pep talk and tell him, he can have more if he stops spitting. I give him a bite and I'll give you one guess what he does. Yep. Yogurt all over the place. Again, I tell him no. He laughs in my face, so I decide he's done for the time being. I move on to Nolan again who has been watching Ollie all this time. I give him a big bite and what does he do? He spits it all over the place and laughs hysterically. Now he and Ollie are both looking at each other with their tongues out spitting all over the place and laughing. You can't make this stuff up. I decide to try the ignore tactic and I move on to Lucas again. He continues to do the closed eye, pursed lip, head shake. I try to entice him with Cheerios, puffs, and blueberries. He's not interested. Seriously kid? He then grabs his foot and pulls it up way over his head.

I decide to take an intermission to clean them all up and read them a little story to calm them down. I then try one last time to feed them, and fortunately we have success! So I then get them cleaned up and start taking them up to bed. I put Nolan down in his crib and he cries as per usual. I put Ollie down and he sticks his thumb in his mouth and goes instantly to sleep...as per usual. I take Lucas over to be changed because he didn't get a diaper change before breakfast. And what do you know...another blowout.

I guess sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. This morning, the babies definitely won.