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!

A Mumsy's of Multiples Best Friend

One of the very first people to give me actual triplet baby advice was one of my nurses from the labor and delivery floor at Schumpert where I delivered.

At the time, the advice seemed a bit, well, dated. After all, I had just given birth and had yet to even meet my tiny trio…Very tiny trio, actually.

I suppose that’s why I filed it in the furthest most depths of my very oxygen deprived mind, never to surface again until one day…

As you all know, we have been in the process of moving for the past three weeks. I know what you’re probably thinking. How can it possibly take anyone that long to move?

Well, as it just so happens, husband is working full-time and has two different shows that he is also working on in his spare time. Oh, and did I mention that I have triplets?

I also have a twelve-year-old too, but he spent this past weekend at Six Flags with his best friend. (What sort of mum would I be if I had said no?)

Basically, knowing all of this (save for the Six Flags trip which was nearly spontaneous,) I had started packing up the old house as soon as I knew we were moving into the new one.

I packed up EVERYTHING that wasn’t being used and some things that were. For the past three weeks we have had a lot of fast-food and eaten off of many a paper plate!

Everyday, once my eldest got home from school, I would start taking things over to the new house.

Every night after the babies were fed and put to bed and all was quiet, I would run over and unpack what I had moved earlier that day. When my husband would get home from rehearsal, he would also take loads over, too.

As you can see, this went very, very VERY slowly as necessity dictated that I attempt to clean and pack while quieting fighting babies who had become much to big to share one extra-huge, much- extended play-yard.

When the weekend came for my sisters-in-law to help us move the big stuff (furniture and such,) they were actually very surprised at just how much we had managed to move already.

At this point, I was still keeping the babies at the old house, safe in their play-yard so that they wouldn’t be accidentally trampled by everyone trying to move the large furniture.

Then the day came, our official moving day, our first day in the new house. This meant that the babies would no longer be confined to their play-yard in the living room.

I had very artfully placed the pots and pans in the huge bottom cabinet just so they could discover them and get to play with them, and all of the downstairs electrical sockets had been covered in anticipation of tiny scientists trying to discover electricity.

What I didn’t count on, was that within only a few hours of us being over in the new house, that Kian would decide it was time to get mobile like the big kids and WALK. Yep, Kian walked, A LOT!!!!

This meant that I now had 2 very mobile babies. I had been spoiled by only having one baby which meant that I hadn’t any clue that once I had 2 or more walkers, I would be in TROUBLE!

To Be Continued.....