Evenings and nights

One of the most common questions I still get is if we get any sleep.

One way to answer is to explain how an evening and a night may be.

Our small ones usually eat every three to four hours or so in the daytime. But after dark this accelerates. Around the time the rest of the family eat dinner two hour intervals is normal, when it is bedtime for the older kids the babies want milk almost every hour. So eating is then almost something constant - someone is eating all the time from 8 PM or so...

From 10 PM one after the other MAY fall asleep for the night, but it is hard to predict who will do so first and especially when. Elin is manny nights the last one to fall asleep and that is often way past 11 PM.

A key to get a long nights sleep is to be ready to go to bed whenever the last child is fast asleep. Preparing 6-9 bottles of baby milk, taking care of dishes and tidy up some takes a while - so we must squeeze that in between al diaper changes and feeding. With some luck we can go to bed at midnight.

All babies are capable of sleeping through the night without waking up and demanding food. But lately they haven't done so simultaneously though... So with a short break for 15-20 minutes we usually can sleep until 7-ish. And we may be dozing on and off until 9 at weekends. :) (The pre-prepped bottles is a must to keep everybody happy this long!)

Unfortunately my alarm goes off at 6 AM if it is a workday... But I find six hours of sleep sufficient before going to work.

First haircut

Elin has a small birthmark on the back of her scull. Her hair is on this spot growing much faster and it is almost black. Today we just had to cut it - it stood strait up making her look like an Northern Lapwing (Lat: Vanellus vanellus, Swe: Tofsvipa). So instead of being christened today, Elin got her first haircut.

That wasn't the Saturday we had planned.

Unfortunately today's christening had to be cancelled last night, since a bad stoumach flu had caught up with Siri. We still can't say if anyone else has got it too. We keep our fingers crossed we don't.

Steady growing

Over the last weeks we've realised just how much Elin, Oscar and Filip has been growing lately. We now have yet another way of telling them apart - weight!

I've today updated the growth table for the first time in ages.

Siri (upside down), Elin, Oscar, Filip and Ludvig.

An eventful year

2012 wasn't what I expected. If someone had told me a year ago that I was to have five kids, I would have said that was crazy. Now it is the truth.

Over the last twelve months we have gone from 'hoping to have a third kid' to 'expecting a baby' to 'trying to take in that it was twins' to 'picking up our jaws from the floor after having found a third fetus' to 'having three babies in our arms' to 'living as a family with five kids'.

Each step has been big, but also small enough to cope with. It's been joy, happiness, chocking, scary and a few other feelings along the way. I must say that I'm happy that all didn't struck us simultaneously - imagine going from not knowing if you were to have any more kids to be presented with the fact it's going to be triplets - that would probably have knocked me to the floor literally.

Nothing can beat this roller coaster!

Thanks for the support we've received along the way. Sorry if we haven't repaid as much as we would have wanted, and still continue to as for more support (in the future). What we do try to do is to pay it forward. We learn of new to-be-triplets-parents through our Facebook community every now and then - the latest this very morning - and we try to give input and support here as much as we can. We know how valuable it is!

All five kids last Friday evening.

All three babies sleeping in their bouncy seats while the rest of us (out of picture) eat our New Years Eve dinner.