May Twenty Third Two Thousand Sixteen

And now everyone has two teeth! That was quick. The order for Tooth 2: The Toothening was Sadie and Ellie, and then Martha two days later. Very odd, the randomness of it.

So we’re starting to hit summer - weather’s getting beautiful, we’re able to go for walks now, and after an awfully claustrophobic winter this is a very big deal. But we're still all on a bit of a low, psychologically-speaking. A months-long adrenaline high will do that, I suppose. A big front has a big back, after all, and life right now feels simultaneously relentless and boring. A couple of the ladies have not been going down great, and Oz refuses to go to sleep while the sun is still out (and days are loooong). Yesterday he woke up at 5:15 this morning, and neither of us got back to sleep.

To my further annoyance, it's been particularly challenging to take care of myself. During the parental leave I used the opportunity to drop a couple of pounds, but they have since come back with their friends. Perhaps allowing me to embrace my destiny as a dad. Father’s must be a bit tubby, after all. And preferably tuck their t-shirts into their shorts. Socks and sandals non-optional.

The worst seems to be over for now, though, and the darkness is lifting. Now I'm enjoying a nice Victoria Day just me and my beautiful happy girls - Gill’s driving Oz to the airport as he's going to visit his great aunts for a week, and then a couple days hence she and Eleanor will join them in Ottawa, meaning I’ll have a bit more time to myself.

Being a single father of (mere) twins is something to be looked forward to around here.

Before he left, I made sure to spend some extra attention on the lad and we had a lovely couple of days. Will miss that boy, after all. We just talk these days, like friends. So we've been wandering around the area a fair bit, me just re-acclimating to the old blocks of my childhood, and we recently found a park nearby filled with random trucks and discarded bulldozer toys. We're also starting to see one of the benefits of the area, as the whole neighbourhood is just jammed to the hilt with similarly aged kiddos. He can wander out the door and always find some sort of adventure. Just yesterday he and his friend caught a wild rabbit on a leash.

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Onto the goilz.

It occurred to me the other day, having known a couple of sets, that there is a phenomenon known as 'mirror twins'. Wherein a set of identical twins are perfectly symmetrical with each other - one is right-handed, the other left-handed, hairs are parted oppositely, etc. A fascinating thing, presumably caused by the particular mechanism which divides the fertilized zygote into two.

So, what about mirror triplets? Is that a thing? I searched the term and, amazingly, stumped Google. I honestly didn't know that was possible.

I started checking the girls to see if there were any indications. In particular I became obsessed with the symmetry of their eyes. They, like me, have one eye ever so slightly lower than the other, and I started to get very excited thinking that Ellie's were reversed. Which then got me curious about their 'ancestry'. In other words, what was the order of splitting? The initial zygote would have split once, and then only one of the resulting zygotes would have split again. So, in a very loose sense, two would be slightly more related than the other one, having spent just a tiny fraction of more time developing together. Could mirroring give any hint as to how this would have occurred? Is Ellie from the original split - a mirror split - and then the other two from the resultant ancestral zygote? Baby Q?

But then what if that second split was also mirror? Flipping one back to Ellie's side?

So, no, it tells us nothing. And furthermore, I realized I could just look at their hair-parts. Which are all the same. No mirroring here, sadly.

Just another momentary descent into triplet madness.

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Ellie’s just sitting in her bouncer laughing right now. They are so painfully sweet.

She's grown and grown, her face is pudging out a bit more and though she’s still easy to tell apart it’s more just because she looks like herself, not just that she’s smaller.

Oops, now she's sitting on my lap typing with me. She rarely cries, is almost always happy, gives great hugs. A sweetheart, through and through.

Martha continues to seem a bit more thoughtful these days - but happily so. Doesn’t furrow her brow angrily like she used to, but she’s still just not quite as wide open and content as the other two. But she’s so very happy to play alone or with her sisters, and smiles the minute you lay eyes on her. She, like Sadie and to a lesser extent Ellie, is getting ready to crawl. Getting up on her knees and hands and just rocking, strengthening those stabilizing muscles. Very excited to spend a few days with just her and S.

Sadie is angling towards being the funny one. She figured out fart noises with her mouth a couple days ago and CONSTANTLY does them. And then she laughs. So impossibly, inconceivably cute. And if you do a few enthusiastic fart sounds at her, she’ll almost certainly answer in kind. She’s also the only one who figured out thumb-sucking - she nodded off while doing it just now actually.

Differences continue to emerge, and as they do we’re trying to be grateful for the traits they share - contentment, playfulness, ability to self-soothe and entertain themselves and each other. But most importantly, most improbably, most crucially, they are champion sleepers. Absolutely, blessedly perfect sleepers. When they go down (which is still a tiny bit trickier than it once was) they SLEEP. All night. Until 6:15 or so these days.

Thank you, my precious girls. You have given us a mighty gift that we shall never forget: continued sanity.