Diva

In my last post, I mentioned that Lily seems possessed. She does, but in lieu of the word 'possessed' we are going to use 'diva.' It sounds nicer. She's been getting 4 teeth in and I believe that that is the reason for some of her diva behavior, but by no means am I going to put it all on teething. She doesn't get off the hook that easily.

Once, she woke up at 9:30pm crying. Jack and I were watching TV and I decided to check on her. When I opened the door and went to her, she began screaming like a diva. Hands and legs were flailing and I thought she was going to bust a vocal chord, she was screaming so loudly. I rushed her out of the room so her brother and sister wouldn't wake up. She wriggled out of my arms and fled down the hall like a banchee, I mean, like a diva. She ran screaming all the way down the hall and didn't stop until she ran into a pile of to-be-folded laundry at the end of the hall. She fell into it and then began scratching at the walls. She wouldn't be comforted and nothing I could do would have helped at that point. I've experienced this diva behavior before and know how she works. I stuck her ina pack in play in our spare room and let her get all of her screaming out. Jack and I cracked a bottle of wine and turned up the TV for a while. After about 10-15 minutes, I went back in knowing full well that she'd fall into my arms. I got it right and she cuddled like she hadn't seen me in days. She watched some TV with me and Jack and then we put her down and she fell asleep instantly.

Another diva episode happened about two weeks ago. She wanted a toy that Ellie had and I told her that she needed to wait until Ellie was done with it. Diva Lily came out fast and furious. She ran up to me with "that look." I told her that she needed to be careful lest she hit or scratch me and land herself with a spanking and time out. She controlled herself, but flew over to the table and was getting ready to push everything within reach off of it. I reminded her that she can be mad, but she cannot destroy anything. She let out a diva scream and flew over to the leather footrest and scratched it. The 4 long fingernail scratches will fade over time. I find it hard not to laugh during these episodes because I now that nothing is wrong with her, but she becomes so angry and often hits the point where she just can't even control herself.

She is just a love, but she throws quite a temper tantrum. Don't you just wish that sometimes you could put on a show like that too and just let all the frustrations out without being judged or scaring your young children? I do.

So, I know I'm behind. I've never been a journaler and in fact, I clearly remember in 5th grade, we had our journal books and each morning when we arrived, we had to sit and write a paragraph about whatever. I hated it. I never knew what to write and if I was thinking about it in my head, then why should I write it down and more to the point, why should the teacher be reading it? I'd love to write a book with helpful hints about triplets because there is nothing out there. Sure, Happiest Baby on the Block and Babywise are great, but how does it work and how is everything different when you have 3 babies instead of 1. Believe you me, there are many differences. The idea of writing a book and getting the profits sounds great, but I'm not a writer.

Anyway, here are some recent pics. By recent, I mean within the past 6 months, since I blogged last. I've actually been busy cleaning tomato out of carpet and sunscreen off pots and pans.

Liam was a frog-turtle. The story behind that new species is that I bought him a turtle costume from Babystyle and he loved it. Later, he changed his mind and decided that he wanted to be a frog. Too late, but luckily he believed me when I told him that he was a frog, but looked like a turtle. He said a "frog-turtle" and it fit perfectly. Lily was a flitting ladybug and Ellie was a bee. They were miserably sick that week, but were so beyond thrilled that thye just had to knock on a door and someone would just give them CANDY! They couldn't believe it. I couldn't deprive them because of a fever.

Lily caught on fast to the whole holiday. We had been on our cul-de-sac and then covered the cul-de-sac behind us. We had hit about 16 homes and on the last one, Lily marches up the door and as soon as the lady opens the door, my well-behaved child yells, "I want candy!" I was so proud.

Look at the look on Lily's face. She still can't believe that she gets to eat candy. She was so excited. I still feel that way when I eat it. Candy makes me happy.

More to come. I promise. I'm into it now. All my pics are downloaded. I've got to tell you how Lily seems possessed when she gets really really mad, our flights to and from CA for Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving and the snow we've been playing in. Oh, and the switch from cribs to toddler beds.

I'm Back

I know it has been a while. There's been a lot going on around here! For one, I started working. I'm working 3 very part time jobs, but it is keeping me busy. I love them and it is actually nice to get out of the house. Two of my jobs are on weekends or evenings, so Jack is with the kids. My other part-timer is on Wednesdays and I have an awesome sitter who comes and does endless art projects with them. You know, the art projects that you dream about doing when you have kids, but when you actually have kids, the mess and clean-up involved is just too much sometimes. Yesterday, she collected leaves, cut out a tree from a box, painted the tree, had the kids paint the leaves and then hot-glued the leaves to the tree. First of all, I would never have even thought of that and secondly, it wouldn't have turned out as cute as hers did. Oh, she does the art projects and takes wonderful car of my kids even with her 1-year old daughter whom she brings each time. Gotta love it!

Here's how the week has started:

Monday: I had to get to a triplet group meeting (Jack was out of town) so our next door neighbor was coming to babysit. I had 20 minutes til she came. I was making dinner and on the phone making a Dr. appt for Ellie. I took out some ingredients to make a salad for the kids, but when I went to get the 40 grape tomatoes, they were gone. I could have sworn I took them out, but maybe I had put them back in when I was opening and closing the fridge. Oh well. I went to the playroom to get the kids and lo and behold, all 40 of my tomatoes were spread around the playroom CARPET and smooshed. It looked like they stomped to their hearts' content on the tomatoes on my carpet. And, for a bonus, there was pulp and seeds in their hair. I have never been so mad at them! I get frustrated, yes, but never livid, can't-breathe-mad. After a short rant, I told them to get to their kitchen chairs pronto.
I had 15 minutes to clean the floor and at least start dinner with them before the sitter came. I had to pick up all the tomatoes, pulp and seeds and then got out my awesome carpet stain remover and sprayed away. After about 10 minutes, I went back to the kitchen to get them their dinner.
All the time I'd been cleaning, they had been sitting in their chairs, SILENT! To have 3 2-year olds sitting silent is a miracle. I proceeded to give them their dinner and lecture them. They ate for 10 minutes in silence. I'm not kidding!!! A full 20 minutes of silence!
Ellie said she was done so I got her down and knowing that she was the one who pulled the box of tomatoes down, I got down on her cute little 2-year old eye level and told her, "Don't you ever take anything off this counter again. I'm not mad anymore."
She followed up with, "Mommy all done mad?"
"Yes, baby, I'm all done being mad."
Liam pipes up, "Mommy happy!"
"No, baby, I'm not quite happy yet, but I'm not mad."

Tuesday: They were playing happily in the kitchen with all the pots and pans, so I took a few minutes, meaning probably 4 minutes total, to run upstairs and do a load of laundry. Just as I'm coming back down the stairs, Ellie says, "Mommy clean hands?" Uh-oh. There was a white creamy substance all over her hands and as I turn the corner in the kitchen, there is a chair pulled up to a counter and pots and pans all over the floor. Wait....the creamy white substance is all over the pots and pans too, and my cupboards, and Lily and Liam. As a result of my master detective skills, I deduce that they have pulled the sunscreen off the counter, unscrewed it and wiped it everywhere! Note to self: sunscreen does not come out in the dishwasher, nor does it come out if you use scalding hot water and dishsoap. If you're invited to our house for dinner, the dinner you are served may have a slight sunscreen taste. The excess wine that we will be serving will take care of that taste.

Wednesday: I went to work and maybe stayed a little later than usual. :)

I'll work on getting pictures up.

It makes me feel good when....

We are watching the women's Olympic beach volleyball match and Liam looks up at Kerri Walsh on TV, points and says, "Dere's Mommy!"

I wish Baby, I wish...

My Babies are Almost 2!!!

My "babies" turn 2 years old tomorrow! In thinking back over the past couple years, I thought I'd write about our struggles with infertility and how our 3 beautiful babies came to be.

I can't belive that time has gone so quickly. I never thought it could be like this. When I think back to when the babies were born or when I was pregnant, it seems like last summer and I have to remember that it was 2 summers ago. If you had told me that by my 5th wedding anniversary (November) I'd have 2-year old triplets, I would have laughed right in your face. Yet, here they are and my life has been changed upside down for the better. What did I do before these babies were here? I must have been bored, but I know that I wasn't. I had an unexplainable longing in my heart for a child and so looked forward to the day that Jack and I would start trying to have a baby. I never thought that infertility would throw a curve ball.

We were married in November 2003 and had talked about having kids since before we were engaged. We knew it was something that both of us desperately wanted, me more than him though. We were both older when we got married (not really, but a little bit in baby-making terms) so on our 1st wedding anniversary, I went off the pill. For some reason I thought that I'd be blessed with two stripes the first month. Nope. Maybe the second? Nope. I allowed myself that 3 month adjustment when you go off the pill after being on it for so long. Still nothing. I began tracking my basal body temps in the morning and noticed after 2 months that it looked like the blade of a saw, not at all what it should look like. I made an appointment with my OB and took her all the evidence. She agreed that I wasn't ovulating and I started on Clomid.

Clomid has a mind of its own. I didn't like that at all. I had severe hot flashes at random times throughout the day and night and I was on edge, emotionally. Hot flashes that would have me violently throwing off the covers in the middle of the night in a sweat or sticking my head in someone else's freezer at a bridal shower because I thought I was going to pass out and because the sweat running down my head was messing up my makeup and getting my clothes wet. Those kind of hot flashes. Jack was doing the laundry one day and instead of being thankful, I cried when he dropped a sock and told him that he just didn't care that much about me if he could drop a sock and not pick it up. Poor guy. He put up with a lot.

Three months of Clomid and a shot to ensure I ovulated did nothing, so my OB handed me a list of names of REs and sent me off. I cried all the way home. How could we have fertility problems? This soooo wasn't in "my plan" and for those of you who know me, I stick to my plans like all Type-A people do. Following testing, we found out that Jack's sperm don't like to swim so we got our heads around the infertility idea and began our journey.

Fortunately (for me) I had a friend who was also going through infertility and I got the name of her RE and we have a family friend who is an OB and she gave me the name of a friend of hers who is an RE. I picked my RE and we met with him in September 2005. He suggested that we start with insemination since it is not as expensive and not as invasive. So, after the battery of tests that I had to go through, I began injections in November 2005 and we had our inseminations in December.

December 2005 was a busy time for us. Jack had decided to take a new job that would move us away from my family and RE in Southern California to Denver, a beautiful city, but a city where we knew no one. We had movers coming December 17th to move all of our things and put it all in an apartment we rented. We were set to go out to Denver in January. I quit my job as a speech therapist in a school and wasn't sure if I'd get a job or not. A lot was depending on the result of our insemination.

On Friday, December 16th, I left my school for the last time and was finishing packing before the movers arrived the next morning. Jack was in Atlanta for a training and the phone rang. "I'm sorry Christie, but the pregnancy test was negative." I was so crushed. My life was packed up in boxes to move to a new state without support, my husband was away and I found out that my newly adjusted infertility plan was squashed. They gave me an appointment for January 5, 2006 to begin IVF. I know that most people try several times with insemination, but with our diagnosis, it would have been a waste of time, so said our RE. It was during all of this that my best friend told me she was pregnant and wouldn't you know it she wasn't even tryign to get pregnant!

After the news, Jack and I decided together that I would stay with my family in SoCal and continue on to IVF and Jack would move to Denver by himself. After spending Christmas with my family, Jack and I drove to Denver and I helped him unpack while he began his job. At that time, we were in a teeny tiny one bedroom apartment. He worked from home and needed an office, so our bed was in what was supposed to be the dining room and his office was in the bedroom where he was able to close a door. Jack drove me to the airport on January 4th.

January 5th, we began the whirlwind of ordering meds and learning how to inject myself. I actually still have all my extra syringes. I'm not sure why I don't throw them out, although it is either because I'm too lazy to find and drive to the disposal area for those kinds of things or because I'm sentimental. Maybe a little of both. I got used to the injections, but definitely had my days where I was ready to inject and just broke down. Why do I have to give myself shots and go through all of this when 15 year olds can get pregnant one time? Why do most of my friends have no problem getting pregnant. When I was going through all of this, one of my friends, who ended up getting pregnant on her honeymoon (accidentally) said that "it (infertility) was better than getting pregnant when your husband looks at you." No, it really isn't. I'd much rather have that "problem." It was a really hard time emotionally.

I had my egg retrieval surgery on January 28th and the transfer on February 1st. The retrieval wasn't as scary or bad as I thought it would be. It was nice to be put to sleep and I didn't have any problems recovering. My RE retrieved 13 eggs and all 13 were fertilized that day. Jack flew in for my surgery but had to go back to work a few days later, so my mom went with me to the transfer. A day or two before the transfer, our RE called me to discuss how many embryos to transfer. He gave me all the stats for my chances of getting pregnant at all, if we put 2 in and if we put 3 in. On a sidenote, I've never won anything, ANYTHING. I just don't have that kind of luck. Oh, I've entered contests and even bought lottery tickets (not that I expected that to go anywhere, but I can hope) and I've never won. So, this track record did have some bearing on my decision regarding the embryos. Anyway, our RE said that I had a 70% chance of pregnant at all, which is good, but not a guarantee by any means. If we put in 2 embryos, I had a 35% chance that both would take. If we put in 3 embryos, I had a 35% chance that we'd get twins and a 5% chance that we'd get triplets. He recommended that we put in 2 or 3. So, rather than go through everything we'd been going through and not get a baby, we decided to put in 3. Our decision was made over the phone. Difficult? Oh yes. I wanted Jack right there so we could talk about it face to face. Instead, we discussed over the phone before the Dr. called back. Three it was.

After the transfer, I just didn't feel that it worked. I laid in bed, like they told me, for 5 days doing nothing. I didn't feel anything. I think I was expecting (hoping) to feel everything the books say you'll feel when you're pregnant, but I felt nothing. About a week after the transfer, I felt a painful pinch in my abdomen area. I chalked it up to left-over cramping from the surgery or transfer or something. Looking back, I think that pinching was one of the embryos latching on, but I don't know for sure.

On February 13, 2006, I had my bloodtest to determine if I was pregnant or not. Jack flew into town to be with me for the test and results. After the test, they told me to go home and not worry. Right. Early that afternoon, I got a call from my favorite nurse and I could tell by her voice that the news was good. She said that I was definitley pregnant and most likely with more than one. Jack and I were thrilled! Then she said my HcG number: 656. I don't totally remember what the "normal" pregnancy number is, I think somewhere around 100. Yes, I was definitely pregnant and would have to wait to find out.

This post is getting really long, but I'm on a roll and the kids are still sleeping. :)

Our first ultrasound revealed 2 well developed fetuses and 1 that was significantly smaller than the other 2. The Dr. said that it looked like that one wasn't going to develop any further and that he didn't expect to see it at the next ultrasound. That was a mixed blessing. Did we want triplets? Not really. Did we want twins? Definitely! But, we were torn...we wanted to root for our little baby but not completely.

The next ultrasound, we saw the first 2 again and then he scanned over to the other side of my uterus. There it was! Bigger than the first 2. Amazing. The room got really quiet and the Dr. and nurse just looked at us. The Dr.'s tone of voice got quieter and he said that in this case he didn't think selective reduction was needed. It wasn't going to be an option, but it was nice to hear a Dr. say that it wasn't needed.

Anyway, this post got a little off track, but thinking that those little fetuses are my healthy beautiful babies who will be 2 years old tomorrow just makes me a little nostalgic.


I'm working on another post to follow this one about their birth and some pictures from their birthday. Also, we flew to CA last night and I have some stories about that flight also. Flying iwth them is definitely getting easier, but it is still A LOT of work.

Christie