Meet Baby C

Caden Wood


Caden was born 2 lbs. 5 oz. and 14.5 inches. I use to call him Kung Fu Caden because during the ultra-sounds he would do what appeared similar to martial arts. He was obviously fighting for room and now that he has it he is the largest of the three. He is very demanding of attention and once he has it he is very cute. He will squish out his double chin, smile and gurgle. He is by far the loudest and he loves his own vo

ice. He has an amazing ability to stand with very little support which he has been doing since January, although the therapists say we shouldn't condone this because its skipping steps. I love that he does the "daddy spaz". Sometimes I just spaz out in a hyper manner because it makes them laugh, I couldn't believe when I saw Caden doing this, its really cute. Caden has grown a "fade" haircut which looks exactly like mine. Our doctor even grilled us about cutting his hair with clippers lol. It makes you feel very warm when his big chubby cheeks rise up to a smile. Thanks for your time.

Meet Baby B

Logan Wood
Logan was born 2lbs. 10oz. and 14 inches long. Logan is like Nermal off of Garfield. When we had our first ultra-sounds done baby B was the only one who would not only cooperate, but seemingly pose for the pictures. He is still a great picture kid to this day. He has a great attitude and is pretty easy to make smile, but makes you feel rewarded when you get that smile. He is constantly looking around the absorbing everything that is going on, even if there is a bottle in his mouth ><. Every morning when I wake him he greets me with a, "Hi! :)" I hope its me anyway, tonight when he was put to bed he said, "hi" to his mobile. When he was born I was more worried about him than the other two based on looks alone. He did not have major problems thank god and turned out to be a complete heart throb! Thanks for your time.

Meet Baby A

Olivia Wood

Olivia was baby A. She was born 2 lbs. 1 oz. and was 14 inches long. She has had an onslaught of medical problems but somehow is our happiest baby. Just make eye contact with her and you will see a smile that can light up the room. I noticed at a very young age that she had a remarkable ability to moch. She started sticking her tongue out when I would when she was in the NICU which nearly brought me to tears because we had fears of serious medical issues. One morning in early December I woke up to see her stairing at me. I waved at her the kind of open and close grasp baby wave and to my suprise she did it right back. I jumped up and said,"no way.." outloud. She has been doing it ever since. Her hand eye cordination is outstanding. We believe this to be because she had practice grabing her tubes and extubating herself frequently in the NICU. It has been pretty challenging keeping her nasal canula in due to this. She was the first to find her voice back in January and has been toying with it cutely ever since. With gods help all of her major medical conditions will be gone at around a year old. She is almost off of oxygen now and reflux is supposed to be outgrown on average of one years old. Its hard to believe that she can have a very serious reflux episode then moments later when she is still watery eyed and discolored look up to see you and smile ear to ear. She is a true angel. Thanks for your time.

The Routine

Ah the daily routine. I don't have very much free time so, as you may have noticed, I don't write very eloquent. Throughout the day when all the kids are happy for a second I stop to type a sentence or two as fast as possible then get back to them. In fact, the kids aren't even awake yet and I took three breaks so far on this blog. I've read lots of routines from different parents and to me they always seemed to be over complicated. We needed things to be as easy as possible so by trial and error we ended up with a very nice process. Organization is defidently key. If you have multiples, buy a label maker so your family knows right where to put things when they help out. Knowing your thermometer is right where it is supposed to be or your Oragel etc. can keep things rolling. Bottle props aren't recommended by the professionals, but I see them as a very useful tool. Obviously I don't leave their side while they are propped. Would you rather take fourty minutes to feed two babies or take twenty while having a cup of joe? At 5am my wife wakes up and feed and change the boys before she heads to work. She wakes me up at 6am to feed, change and give Olivia her meds. Back to sleep for me, if I can. Sometimes its hard to sleep when its quiet, its too enjoyable. I wake up at 9am if I fell back to sleep and get the boys up. I prefer to feed them oatmeal in the morning mixed with apple juice but I mix it up. Oatmeal keeps them regular and an apple a day keeps the doctor away :P I give the boys their bottles then change them. I find a spot they are happy (Caden is hard to please) then I wake up sister. She is on diaretics to keep fluid out of her lungs so she can have issues with BM's so I base her morning mix by that. Its oatmeal mixed with prune juice if she hasn't BM'd in the last 24 hours, a different juice if she has. Then feed her her bottle,meds and change her. WAIT I missed the best part of my routine. Nothing in the world is better than waking up the kids! When you look down on them and say good morning is a bright happy smile every morning! God I love it, its fuel for the day. After Olivia is finished I have to position her in a 45 degree chair to prevent her from refluxing everything she ate up. Sadly she has to stay this way for a couple hours, which is the cause of her flat skull. I start the physical therapy with the boys as much as they will tolerate it. They absolutely hate tummy time so we have to find sneaky ways to get it in. Over my leg and on the exercise ball seem to be the best atm. I work on bringing things to mouth because they dont seem to have that instinct even though they are teething. Try out some side time if tolerated as well. Some days I get in alot of therapy, some days none. It really depends on their moods. The most important thing about this time of day for me is eye contact. Both boys are jealous so you have to make sure you connect with them. Usually by now I can work with Olivia on neck control and other basics. Even though she is 7 months old she is rated at a 1 month level physically. I find a happy spot for them throw in a load of laundry and sneak a meal in before their bottles at 12:30. I've heard of people with triplets doing 6 loads of laundry a day on tv and that means one of two things. They are either over doing it which will just add stress or their kids all had reflux but didn't mention the negatives on tv. We get by with 1-2 loads a day average for the whole house. Feeding, doing meds and changing the boys and then sister takes till 1:45 or so. We have fun time between these feeds, anything to make them happy. Wifey gets home at 3:30 usually and is ready to help by 3:45. We feed the boys solids again at 4 targeting more fruits and veggies. Then bottles/change. We stopped feeding Olivia solids at this time because the formula has more calories per ounce and she needs them. We feed Olivia her bottle, meds and change her At this point mom gets some fun time with all of them working on physical therapy once again while I do the dishes from the last 24 hours :) Thats right, we bought enough bottles to make it 24 hours and yes I let the dirty dishes sit. Dont judge me :) I use to do more dishes but the kids would be alone, you have to weigh your values. A days worth of dishes take over an hour sometimes lol. I use dish soap with bleach alternative because bottle brushes have sponges on them which studies are showing hold more bacteria than anything in the house. When I'm finished with the dishes my wife makes formula and fills enough bottles to make it 24 hours. Harder than it seems since the boys are on Symilac advanced and Olivia is on half Enfamil AR and half Symilac Special Care. I usually cook a fast dinner, slip the clothes in the drier and we eat on the floor so we can at least have some eye contact time with them. The weather has been ok lately so we try to sneak in a walk when we can. The walk we take is very very short, its more for exposure to new things. Before you know it 6:30pm is here and begins "sour hour". Since our kids sleep through the night very well (thank god) they get very fussy the hour before their bedtime bottle. It is every night and it is when most visitors come over. When the combination of teething, growing pains and sleepiness hit all at once, it's chaos. Finally at 8:30 we sneak in the kids bottles, meds and change just before putting them to sleep. The boys have been sleeping very well in Wombies but sister hates the constriction. Her guarding defense sets in due to such a long time in the hospital. After they are asleep we finish a few things, pick up, enjoy the quiet time together. Of course I left out lots of the variables throughout the day. Everytime Olivia refluxes hard enought to vomet we have to change it dirtys, we can sometimes catch it with a burp cloth if its small enough. Hurray for cloth diapers used as burp cloths! Also taking trash out when needed, the diaper pail, baths, things like that. I didn't want to buy a diaper genie because the refills cost so much so I tried to find an alternative. There is lots of talk on triplet connection looking for alternatives as well. I found a 7.6 gallon stainless steel round step can from Target that is air tight and holds alot of diapers. Beware when you open it though :) Thanks for your time.

2nd blog, Still catching up on our story

I want to start today by saying sorry for all the negativity in my first blog. I want to be honest in my blogs so maybe someone can relate, because the fact is friends and family haven't experienced much of this so they cannot. The fact is having multiples isn't like it seems on tv where they go on elaboate trips, cry rarely and all the babies are healthy. Alot of the time when having multiples there is a baby or two that have extended medical conditions if not permanent. A trip for us at this point in time is a huge issue. We have to evaluate everything. (Are there going to be alot of people there? People naturally want to get close up and see the babies and if they get sick they will probably end up in the hospital. Will the place we travel to have a plug in for Olivia's oxygen saturation monitor? The battery life is only 4 hours max. How much oxygen do we take? Diaper bags filled for three, two or more of everything. How many outfits in case she refluxes more than once? Where are we going to be at their feed time? etc. etc.) Our daughter Olivia has alot of conditions to look after. The list includes; Major acidic reflux, Sandifers syndrome, torticollis, flat skull, bronchopulmonary dysplasia. She has had surgery for PDA ligation, broviac install + removal, premature retinopathy. The only way to get her off of oxygen right now is groth and development which is hard with reflux. It is also hard when doctors false diagnose. She had to be seen in the University PICU (same system as Regional) two times for reflux apnea. I told the doctors exactly what it was, but they didn't believe that reflux apnea was even real. They called a Neurologist who diagnosed her with seizures even though the only symptoms she had were ones alot of preemies have, torticollis and occasional eye crossing. He put her on phenobarb which destroyed her appetite. We got to the point where we were feeding her every two hours and she was barely finishing 12 ounces a day. Finally I trusted my instinct again and went to a different neurologist who agreed it doesn't sound anything like seizures but more likely sandifers and took her off the phenobarb. Thank god her appetite is back, but we have alot of catch up weight gain in store. She only gained one pound the 6 weeks on phenobarb. On a lighter note, since then we have seen alot of progress. She still has reflux pretty bad but she can go without her nasal canula oxygen when she is awake the majority of the time, but needs it when she is eating and sleeping. The lower oxygen makes trips more possible so lately we have been going for walks. In fact last week was our first walk where none of the babies cried :) We still have to play catch-up on the preemie thing as well for all of them. Its harder for some preemie babies to do tasks that are natural for other babies. We are at 7 months old now and they have only rolled from tummy to back, Olivia only once on an incline. They are all three teething but dont know how to bring chew toys to their mouth. In fact when you put a teething toy in their mouth they dont chew it, they cry. For three months now it has been a constant battle of orajel, massaging their gums with a binky and tylenol. Although they exceed in other catagories. All three of them say, "Hi!" at proper times. Olivia can wave and has been since december. Caden can stand on his own if he has a toy to brace himself on. Logan can hold his bottle alot of the time. Physically i've always challenged myself so the physical battle of housework and the kids isn't stressful at all. The crying seems to be the only thing stressful so far (medical conditions aside). You cannot make Olivia eat faster so if the boys decide they want to cry while you are feeding her there isn't much you can do and vise versa. Alot of the crying is from teething, some I believe to be growing pains since the boys are growing so fast and some is due to being tired since they are on such a schedule they know when bedtime is and cry the hour before. We call this "Sour Hour". Even though we go through all this, a single smile from one of them can make all your worries vanish. I have to go because one of them is awake. I think this almost catches our story up. Thanks for your time :)

First Blog ~ 7 Months old

Hi everyone! I guess we had better catch up on my story. A year ago on april 1st of all days we found out we were having multiples. At first the doctor said he see's 3 for sure, but also two other spots so it could be quints. I knew there was no time for extreme panic so I instead went into education mode and started to find out everything I could about multiples. When I googled quints it brought me right to blogspot where I met the Wilkinsons. I wrote them a letter in panic and they took the time out of their day to send me a few links to helpful websites. A week or so later I found out it was only triplets. By then I realized how much less my life would change, so triplets didn't seem so hard. With quints we would have probably went to a doctor out of state because the hospitals locally dont have the experience of anything over triplets. We also would have had to buy a new house, a van, etc. The pregnancy went very well for my wife. She never really ran out of energy and was rarely in extreme pain. She also worked all the way up to 26.5 weeks. We had the kids at 27 weeks missing our target of 36. The boys were on the vent for minimal time and had very few problems throughout their hospital stay. Our daughter had a different story. She had to get transfered to a different hospital because ours didn't have a pediatric surgeon. I wish I could go back in time and tell them to take her to St. Louis Childrens hospital but instead we picked the closer Columbia Regional. She had her PDA ligation without any problems but when we told the staff we were going to move her back to the original hospital, things changed. We did not want to stay at Regional because everything about it seemed to be ran poorly. They would let kids oxygen saturation sit at very low levels for long periods of time while they sat in the hall at a computer. When she would have complications sometimes we couldn't find any staff to come help. There were hundreds of issues, it almost seemed like they tried their hardest to do as little as possible just to get the day by. Once the hospital realized we weren't staying they seemed to put her on a "back burner". She kept having lots of sputum and I asked a nurse if they were culturing it. Her responce was "No..........Do you want us to?" I replied yes so she did and found pnemonia. For a month straight on the jet ventillator and 70-100pct oxygem levels the doctors only came in once a day to do rounds not changing much of anything except her antibiotics and tpn levels. They were just trying to get her good enough to transfer back but somewhere along the way they forgot about her. They would try about every 3-4 days to feed her a couple ounces but when she didn't digest them right away they would pull feeds and repeat. Every day got worse. My wife would be crying because our daughter kept getting worse and the doctors would ask her why she was crying and tell her she should be on anti-depressants. After realizing that no one at this hospital knew what they were doing I started to research online things you could do for someone in my daughters condition. It turns out there were multiple things they weren't trying that they SHOULD have been. Including Nitric Oxide, breathing treatments, Reglin etc. We forced a care conference and it turned out to be a joke. We expected lots of experts in different fields to be in there and problem solve. It turned out they just wanted us to ask questions so they could blow smoke up our backsides with a smile and not really answer anything. We caught the doctor in several lies. She said babies my daughters age couldn't have bronchial spasms which every expert since then has since said yes she can. She said Nitric Oxide could cause cancer, which at the time I didn't realize she probably meant the 1000 parts per million from cigarettes, not the 5 PPM used in hospitals. Since she was so answerless the next day she asked if we wanted to transfer her to the old hospital. This was the hardest decision of our lifes by far. They would have to bag her since there was no jet ventillator on the ambulance. Since the doctors put no effort into finding out what her "episodes" were throughout her stay in the hospital, her condition was degenerating everyday, and they refused to put her on sterroids which she should have been on long ago, we decided to make the move risking her life but hoping to save it. The move was scary. Once in the other hospital they put her on Nitric, gave her Reglin, gave her breathing treatments, put her on steroids and fed her. She ate 10cc's which was more than the entire stay at Regional, she got of the jet vent and onto the regular one and her oxygen need went down by around 10pct. All this in the first HOUR at the other hospital. Her condition got better a little everyday. As it turned out she didn't even have pnemonia anymore, Regional just didn't take the time to look at her carefully enough to know her high white bloodcell count was because of being on the ventillator too long and anyone intibated has gram negative rods. I skipped lots of mishaps and neglect that happened at Regional because it happened every minute she was there so it would take me a month to type it.
The boys ended up coming home after 2 months in the hospital, our daughter 3 months. The boys dont have very many long term major conditions. They are a little behind because they are preemies but thats normal. Caden has a flat spot on his head and mild torticollis which is getting better. Olivia however has had an onslaught of medical problems since coming home. The kids are awake so I'll get into that the next chance i get to get on here. Thanks for your time.