Saved By the "Goldfish" (or part 2 of A Mumsy's of Multiples Best Friend

Now, both Kian and Kai can walk. Today, I learned exactly what other people meant when they talk about triplets being a handful.

It’s easy to chase one baby. However, throw in another walker, and you start to wonder exactly how one is supposed to go about keeping them all out of harm’s way.

Add in the third baby who does what we call the “Cripple” crawl where she sort of walks on one leg while dragging the other one underneath her body. She knows how to crawl the “Normal” way, but this way is FASTER!

Now, you have to understand that the new house is MUCH larger than the last one. It’s also very open and has a fireplace and an upstairs.

For the first time every, the babies have been allowed to just BE. There isn’t any need for the tiny play-yard here. This arrangement seemed fine at first, too.

Then Kian decided to go mobile and my world changed FOREVER! This meant that both he and Kai could both walk in different directions, with different motivations and get into trouble equally and with great distance, sometimes rooms, between them.

Kaiden discovered that there are Pyrex dishes in the other cabinet that has yet to get its baby-latches installed. Meanwhile, in the hallway, Kian has discovered that there is more to the house than the first floor. He found the staircase.

At first, I was lucky. Because Kian had only been walking for a few hours at best, he couldn’t yet fathom taking on the task of mastering the art of stairs.

Then Vivie decided she, too, could go exploring. While Kai was busy placing his blocks carefully into the Pyrex bowls under the counter, and Kian was eye-balling the stairs with the eye of a mountain-climber, Vivie had jumped right in and managed to climb up onto the hearth of the fireplace.

Meanwhile, the oxygen deprived mummy was trying to figure out who was more apt to be in immediate harm’s way. These decisions are NOT fun and are not anywhere near easy to make.

I somehow managed to get Kian’s attention from the end of the hallway, giving him the urge to have a gold-fish cracker RIGHT THEN AND NOW!

The very idea that Kian might get something that Kai would miss out on was NOT sitting well with Kai who suddenly decided that his blocks could just sit on the floor for the moment while he too went into the hallway, following the sound of Kian’s voice saying fishie, goal-fishie.

The new-found “Pied-piper” syndrome that I had acquired from possessing that much needed bag of gold-fish crackers gave me enough time to head for the fire-place to try and convince Vivie NOT to try and get down by herself (she cannot walk yet but apparently can climb very well) or just scoop her up away from the brick.

Nobody got hurt that time, but this was about the point that Debbie’s (my nurse from the hospital) advice popped into my head. “Gates are my friend,” she had said. Gates. That was the key here. What we need are gates!