March Twentieth, Two Thousand Sixteen
Apologies, all, for the lack of entries the last few weeks. The reasons are twofold.
1) It's about at this time in the chronicling that entries start getting infrequent, but worse than that, a little myopic. More mundane. And a bit more personal. So, I'm sparing you some of that.
2) In real time - 2017 time - the boy and the girls have gone through a phase shift. The lad, as an active four year old, sucks up almost all psychological RAM available from me, and the girls - beautiful, happy, amazing as they are - sop up whatever gravy's left. And then there's, you know, work and married life and friends and all that. So there hasn't been much to go around.
As such, these will be coming out in dribs and drabs for the next little while, and then we'll close up shop once we hit the girls' first birthday - the blog's about hazy rememberings from a single year of triplets, after all.
Without further ado, March 20, 2016.
Sunday morning’s are the closest thing I have to time off. If I play my cards juuust right, I can feed the girls with Gill at 7AM and then get them all back to sleep. Then I can nap for another 30-45 minutes or so and still have some time to myself while Mommy sleeps in. Precious, precious morning time.
And it's this time I'm using to type now, but it's hard to express any semi-linear thinking these days. Thoughts are chopped off, hurled out, tossed and made into salad. Coherency doesn’t seem to be coming too easily - these sentences included.
It's partially a scheduling thing - mornings are precious, days are busy, evenings are exhausted. Where does reflection fit?
Oh, wait. Two girls are awake. Stand-by.
I had the girls and boy to myself the for six hours yesterday. Oz napped for half of it, so that was a gift. The girls were a bit fussy, and definitely needed attention that I wasn’t able to give them the entire time. I put them on their bellies, back in the bouncers, flipped them over to the swing, then start the cycle over again. I also did two feeds on my own, as well, which is... not easy, particularly as they're not eating very well these days. Because these girls are most certainly waking up, and are spending their days in ever-evolving lucidity. You can see the lights gradually turning on in their eyes, like someone's working a dimmer switch in their little noodles, and they - rightfully - are looking for a little more engagement from us. Hard to pull off and still manage any time for oneself.
Not that I use personal time terribly well these days. I have no songs to record (and I couldn't even if I did, as my entire home recording studio set-up seemed to break all at once recently - a not-so-subtle metaphor). I'll still plink away at a melody occasionally on the piano (so long as Oz isn’t around as. His one flaw, he can’t stand when I play piano.) Mostly will try reading something - on the Kindle if I have energy, on the phone if I don’t.
And there may remain a lingering oddness to having moved back to the neighbourhood I grew up in. It feels like I’ve been on this long journey, tunneling around in the earth blindly, only to pop my head back up and - oops - I'm right back in my backyard again. And I can call it a choice, because it was, but it takes a moments of justification to reshape it into anything other than stasis.
In baby news, Ellie has a weird bumpy rash all over her body. No fever, no other symptoms. All of our readings suggest rashes aren’t that big of a deal on their own, so we'll just wait it out I suppose. Poor little thing, though. Her attitude out of all of them has been so sweet, so gentle. Very unfair.
And it's sad that these little life events will just happen occasionally, picking one girl at random. What if this rash is the trigger for some butterfly-effect phenomenon, and she ends up a junkie or, worse, a lead singer?
Parents can’t control the random winds, I guess. Our job is to just help kids build their boats.
Meanwhile, the view's not too bad. Hi, girls.
