Wow, another year has gone by so fast, a whole year since I wrote about our first year of gentle parenting and breastfeeding triplets. This last year has obviously been gentle parenting and breastfeeding TODDLER triplets, which has been a whole new ballgame!
It’s been a year of learning to walk, and then run and then climb and now jump. It’s been a year of leaving behind family and friends to move from New Zealand to Hong Kong. It’s been a year of connecting with other triplet breastfeeding mamas through blogs and groups and spreading the word that it can be done. It’s been a year of more sleep deprivation than is legal…in short it’s been a wild, busy and crazy year! But we are still breastfeeding, and that has got to be a bonus!
These days they are all sleeping through the night, Willow started doing this around 12 months, Summer around 18 months and Connor finally decided it was time to give mama a break just 2 weeks ago and went from 3 hour stretches all through the night to suddenly doing 12 hours straight…miracle!! So no more breastfeeding at night for us, but the day time is still crazy boobie time! They all wake up around 5-6am, and Daddy gets up with them primarily because he goes to work at 7.30 and isn’t home until long after the kids are in bed so it’s his only time to see them during the day, but it also gives me an extra hours sleep (which I might possibly use for facebook time!) I feed them all around 7am, which is a noisy riot of who gets to go on first and who has to wait. This is still the hardest part of breastfeeding triplets, listening to the heartbroken one who has to wait for their turn. They haven’t become any better at sharing or understanding just because there are three of them, people say to me all the time ‘oh they must be great at sharing’…not so. I don’t force them to share anything else, but it is an unavoidable fact that they have to share mama and the boob.
Anyway, so that feeding may take an hour, with various changes of who’s on where, and back on and back off…there is always someone waiting to take a place if someone else is distracted for a second! Then we play for a bit and go for our morning walk. We have a lovely safe area to walk around, which is great for them to learn how to stay close to mama, how to navigate stairs, and lots of fun nature stuff to look at and poke. We come back from our walk and play some more and maybe get out to do a grocery run, which we do most days, in small amounts to make it manageable, plus it counts as another outing for their active minds! When we come home it’s time for a nap which is nursing them all to sleep, one after the other. It takes me around 30-45 minutes to get them all asleep, and I might get anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to myself while they sleep. This is usually chore time (which I might possibly use for facebook time!) When they get up they all want boobie again, which counts as the first course of lunch. After lunch we go for our main outing of the day which could be a bus ride to the park, or a walk to the park, or a playdate with friends. The other day we even did a ferry ride to get to a museum! I am getting pretty good at taking them out places by myself…we can either go out in a double buggy and one Ergo, or I can wear two Ergos and one walks, depending on how far we are travelling. We are pretty much past any NIP, they seem to get enough at home, and don’t really ask for it while we are out and about, which I am kind of grateful for, given the competition and level of noise that goes with nursing!
They may have more boobie during the afternoon if anyone gets upset, or gets hurt, or if they just fancy a snack…they are always eating other food, and drink plenty of water but it hasn’t really slowed them down in terms of wanting boobie! Then we start the bedtime routine about 3.30pm…it takes about two hours to get them fed dinner, change three butts, change three bodies into pyjamas, brush teeth, read stories and nurse everyone to sleep (and that’s nights when we don’t have bathtime!) They are all asleep by 5.30/6pm and I get a lovely few hours to myself before my husband gets home, (which I might use for facebook time!) then I get myself to bed by about 9pm so I’m ready to start it all again tomorrow!
I am actually grateful that we are still breastfeeding, throughout our move to Hong Kong it was the one constant in their lives and kept them calm and connected. It was a very stressful time, with an 11 hour plane trip, 4 changes of homes in 4 weeks, suddenly not seeing any family, seeing a lot less of Daddy, new people, new food, new everything…breastfeeding was a godsend. And because 3 toddlers can get VERY loud, it is lovely to have such a simple thing to use when they are hurt or upset. I understand that breastfeeding a child who is 2 years old isn’t for everyone, and I fully support other women’s choices in how long they breastfeed for, but breastfeeding my triplets for 2 years has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life and I am proud of myself and very happy that it continues. My children will decide when it is time to wean, and that is what works for my family.
Davina
