It’s hard to believe that tomorrow will be one week since the arrival of our three little Blessings.  June 22, 2011 at 11:43, 11:44, and 11:45, my sweet babies, Jocelyn Rae (2 lb 5 oz, 15 1/2″), Kaitlyn Grace (1 lb 15 oz, 14 1/4″), and Aiden Matthew (2 lb 4 oz, 15″) were born.  Their gestational age was 31 weeks and 5 days.  The average delivery point for triplets is 32 weeks.  I am officially below average

It all happened so very fast, and this past week has been a whirlwind.  I don’t have much time to write, but I wanted to give everyone a quick update.  Last Tuesday, I went in for my weekly ultrasound and doctor’s visit feeling a little trepidation.  My at-home blood pressure readings had been trending slightly high for the past two days, and I had a persistent headache that wasn’t going away with Tylenol.  I had a bad feeling about this appointment.  When they did my blood pressure check in the office, it was more that slightly high, and my doctor told me I needed to be admitted to the hospital for a 24 hour observation to see if I might have preeclampsia.  We didn’t make it 24 hours.  Throughout the evening and into Wednesday morning, my blood pressures kept climbing and reached a scary level Wednesday morning.  That fact, plus the history of concern over the babies’ growth rates as well a borderline doppler reading the day before gave my doctor itchy fingers (his words, not mine) and it was time to deliver.  I was pretty scared, and though I admit I had packed my hospital bag Tuesday morning, I felt completely unprepared.

The delivery was smooth, and not as traumatic as I had imagined it would be.  (I was never too thrilled about the prospect of delivering by C Section.)  Before I even knew the doctor had started, my babies were born.  They are absolutely beautiful, and I couldn’t be a happier mamma.  John is pretty thrilled, too, and has been taking such good care of me.  He is absolutely adorable with his little babies.

The babies are in the NICU and the doctors say they may be there for six to eight weeks.  They are doing well, and every day we have updates that are encouraging.  Jocelyn was born with full lung function, so she has never needed breathing assistance.  Kaitlyn and Aiden need nasal cannulas for the first few days but are now able to breathe on their own as well.  They all needed IV’s and feeding tubes from the beginning, of course, but as of yesterday Aiden and Kaitlyn were tolerating their feedings well enough and getting the nutrients they needed enough so that their IVs were removed.  I expect that Jocelyn will have her IV removed tomorrow.  The nurses love to tell us how feisty and spirited they are.  One of them said little Kaitlyn was a spitfire, so I’m thinking it might be a good thing that mommy has a few weeks to recover before they come home.

On Sunday, I was discharged from the hospital.  It was really difficult for me to leave my babies behind, but I know that they have the kind of care that I can’t give them right now.  I am so thrilled with the neo-natologists and nurses at our hospital.  They are so kind and give my babies the best of  care.  I’m trying to balance rest and recovery with my own need to visit them and hold them and love on them.  Every day we have seen evidence that you all are praying for us.  God has truly been gracious.  We would ask for your continued prayers for the growth and health of our babies, for my recovery, and for wisdom in how to find balance in our new life at the NICU.

John is home with me this week, and we’re spending most of our days  at the hospital.  My mom arrives next Wednesday just after John goes back to work.  We’re taking it one day at a time, and trusting in God’s perfect plan.

Here are some photos of Jocelyn, Kaitlyn, and Aiden

To be honest, I’m feeling discouraged today.  I have been so optimistic that we would make it at the very least to the middle of July, and possibly to the end of July.  Today that optimism has been shaken slightly.  I know many of you have been praying, and I SO appreciate it.  I would ask you to continue to pray.  Pray that my babies continue to grow and pass their BPPs.  Pray that my doctors would exercise the wisdom and experience that I am confident God has already given them.  Pray that I would find rest and peace in God’s sovereignty.  He knows the day and the hour that these babies must be born.  He knows how to quiet my heart.  Only He can give me the grace I need to be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let my requests be known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard my heart and mind in Christ Jesus. (Phil 4:6,7)

Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.  

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!

 If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.

Psalm 139

Today officially begins my twenty-ninth week carrying the triplets.  I’m amazed at how quickly time has been going by, especially since I’m resting at home.  It seems like it took so much to get to this point, and I just want to hit the pause button and enjoy this for a while.  On the other hand, I’m very eager to meet my sweet little girls and my baby boy.  I find myself imagining that I already know their personalities, and I can’t wait to see if I’m right.

At my twenty-four week growth scan ultrasound (right after the last time I posted) Babies A, B, and C weighed in at 1 lb 6 oz., 1 lb 2 oz, and 1 lb respectively, and my doctors were concerned that Baby C was lagging too far behind, so we’ve since been doing growth ultrasounds every two weeks rather than every four weeks.  It looks like we’ll continue with that schedule for the duration of the pregnancy.  This past Wednesday I had another growth report, and they’re currently weighing in at 2 lb 5 oz, 1 lb 13 oz, and 1 lb 10 oz respectively.  Each baby continues to progress at his or her own rate (Baby A is in the 27th percentile, and Baby C is in the less than 10th percentile compared to a singleton baby at this stage), and as long as they continue to show progress at each check, there won’t be any need for me to be admitted to the hospital for more intensive monitoring or to be delivered early.

Otherwise, everything has been going remarkably smoothly with my pregnancy.  I have not been showing any signs of pre-term labor, which has amazed my doctors and nurses.  At the beginning, I read and heard so many of the worst case scenarios, that I really thought I’d be hospitalized or on very strict bed rest at this point.  The reality is that I’m still going to church every week, driving myself to appointments, getting my own meals, and otherwise getting around fairly well.   I will most definitely not be carrying the babies past 37 weeks though, possibly 35 weeks, so unless I go into labor earlier,  I have 8 weeks left at the most!  It really is unbelievable to me, and I cannot completely fathom how our lives will be changed once our little ones are born.

This week, we started weekly BPPs or Biophysical Profiles on the babies.  This is basically a weekly test where they monitor and score each baby based on his or her heart rate (resting, deceleration, and acceleration), breathing, body movement, muscle tone, and amniotic fluid–it’s really a combination of a non-stress test and an ultrasound which is done at the hospital and takes about 2 to 3 hours depending on the babies’ cooperation.  We are certainly checked and monitored constantly.  I now have a weekly OB appointment, a weekly BPP and a bi-weekly growth ultrasound as well as the home monitoring I’m supposed to do:  I take my own blood pressure daily; I monitor for contractions twice daily for an hour each time and submit a report to my home health nurse who calls me three times a week for updates; and I have now also started doing daily kick counts.  There are many, many things that I love about this pregnancy, and I do strive not to complain in general about the minor discomforts and inconveniences.  But if I’m being totally honest, I find all of this monitoring somewhat irritating.  I love my doctors and my nurses.  I appreciate that I’m getting expert medical care from people who have a great deal of experience with high risk pregnancies–in fact, just this week one of my doctors delivered quintuplets and made the local news.  He’s awesome!  But I guess since I’m spoiled by how smoothly things have been going for me, all the poking and prodding and questions feel excessive, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to get worse before it gets better.  Ah, well, if that’s the worst I have to complain about, then I have much to be thankful for… and believe me, I do not take for granted how good I feel or how smoothly things have been going so far.  In fact, there is NOTHING about this pregnancy, or the fact that there IS a pregnancy to talk about that I can take for granted.

Truly, I thank God for every moment of it!

Yesterday, I had a pretty rough beginning to my day.  I was supposed to go to my doctor’s office to get a steroid shot (to help the babies’ lung development in case of pre-term delivery) but I had to pick the steroid at the hospital pharmacy before taking it to my doctor’s office. When I arrived at the hospital (an hour late because a previous appointment was horribly delayed by some crazily inefficient insurance woman who arrived 45 minutes late), the prescription had not been filled yet, even though my nurse had faxed over the RX last week.  The pharmacy told me it would be a few minutes.  Fifteen minutes later I was told the pharmacist was working on it, and it would be 5 to 10 minutes.  Fifteen minutes later I was told once again it would be a few more minutes.  I now had 30 minutes to get my RX, walk over to my doctor’s office and get my shot before the nurse had to leave for the day.  I called the nurse just to let her know what was going on, and that I wasn’t sure if I could get there in time.  Not getting the shot yesterday wasn’t really an option because I was supposed to get a second shot 24 hours later at my scheduled OB appointment.  At this point, the man waiting in line AFTER me, received his RX and I began to have a major emotional melt down.  I found that I was completely unable to keep myself from sobbing in the middle of the hospital pharmacy.  It ended up taking an hour and fifteen minutes to get my prescription filled.  And THEN I got lost trying to find my way out of the hospital.  I can only imagine what I looked like: some crazy pregnant lady, tears streaming down my face, wandering down the halls looking for the right exit.  If it weren’t for the awesomeness that is my nurse who totally rearranged her schedule so she could wait for me, I don’t know what I would have done.

The day ended much better than it started, though.  The ladies from my church threw me a baby shower last night, and so many ladies came to shower me with blessings.  It was a fabulous night.  My Mom-in-law gave a devotional, which was beautiful, and my Mom wrote a letter for her to read at the shower.  I was overwhelmed by the kindness of my friends and church family as well as by my Mom and Mom-in-law’s  words, so the day ended in tears, too.  But at least this time they were good tears.  This whole inability to control public outbursts of emotion is not something I’m getting used to any time soon.  :)

In other updates, my glucose test/gestational diabetes test came back perfect, which is something I was a bit concerned about, so that’s awesome!

AND, the best update I have is that John got to feel a baby kick for the very first time Sunday night.  It was so cool!  I’ve been feeling them flip and wiggle around inside me for a couple of weeks now, but I hadn’t really felt a full kick on the surface of my skin before. I was just relaxing on the couch, and I put my hand on my belly.  Just at that moment my baby boy kicked my hand!  I pressed down a little, and he did it again.  So I made John run over to feel, and sure enough, as soon he put his hand on my belly, Baby Boy gave one more solid kick to Daddy’s hand!  ”That’s your son, John!”  I said.  I think I fell a little bit more in love with both my babies and my hubby in that one moment.

Tomorrow I have another ultrasound to see the babies’ growth progress.  I’ve only gained one pound in the last three weeks, so I’m excited to have some reassurance that they are, in fact, growing and doing well since their last growth assessment–at 20 weeks they were measuring at 11 oz., 11 oz, and 10 oz respectively.

In preparation for this confinement of sorts, I saved my stacks of books on multiple pregnancies, early child care, and parenting philosophy to read until now.  I wanted to get all the physical preparation done for my little babies’ arrival before hand, so I could focus this time on preparing mentally for how we will parent them.  But let’s face it.  Is anyone ever really prepared to be a parent?  From all the feedback I’ve been getting, I think it’s pretty safe to say the answer is no.

Last week in church, the guest speaker quoted a verse that completely refreshed my thinking on this subject.  Proverbs 16:1 “The preparations of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the LORD.”  Of course, his sermon was focused on the tongue, not child-rearing, but I guess my head is in a different place, and this verse really stood out to me in a different application.

The truth is that I could read all the parenting books in the world, but if my heart is not properly prepared, I will never have true parental wisdom.  That preparation comes from the LORD.  My earnest prayer is that the LORD will prepare my heart with wisdom that is from Him and not of myself.  It seems like a no-brainer, but I realized that if I am gain that wisdom then I must use the time I have wisely.  I must put my Bible reading and personal worship time as my highest priority.  Of course, it should always be the highest priority, but let’s get real.  Life happens, work happens, obligations crowd in, and we tend to go through the motions of our personal worship time out of duty or routine… or we skip it altogether because life is just too busy.  How many times have I sighed, “If only I had more time. . .”   Well, now is my chance to put my money where my mouth is.  For the next few months, I have more time than I’ll know what to do with it.  What I do with it will make all the difference in whether my heart is prepared.

Oh, Lord, the nursery can wait, prepare my heart first.

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

When it’s your story, when you’re the one walking through the most difficult pages of your life, it’s so easy to look at all the happy, smiley faces around you and think:  It’s just me, isn’t it?  I’m all alone here.  Everyone else looks so happy.  Everyone else is getting blessed.  And I am aching.

I tell you this not to encourage speculation or assumption about the people around you.  I tell you this because we all walk through our stories, and we all have to do it alone. . . but not really.   As your story unfolds, you are the only one who can walk through it, but you are not the only person ever to have turned through dark pages.   You aren’t the first, and you won’t be the last.

I stopped blogging for a while. I couldn’t tell my story, but writing about anything else felt disingenuous. Looking at me, you might never have known that I was passing through the season of my deepest longing and heartache.

Two years ago, I received  confirmation and diagnosis of what I had long suspected and feared.  I’ll spare the medical details here, but it was clear that I would at the very least have difficulty getting pregnant and almost certainly not without fertility assistance.  My season of longing began before this diagnosis.  My season of longing began even before we as a couple were agreed that we were ready to have children.  But I was never more aware of that longing than when I realized it was possible I might never have that particular desire of my heart.  Certainly, I knew intellectually that God had a Plan.  But I didn’t know what The Plan included.  And I ached.

And that ache was punctuated by many hurtful comments.  Even today, I have tabulated in my head a list of the most wounding comments, made so unwittingly.  I’m still working on letting them go, and it would not be profitable to list here the specific words that have cut me the deepest.

I have realized there is no escaping this strange and misguided view many people have about what passes for acceptable small talk.  When you’re single they ask, “So, when are you gonna find a nice guy and get married?”  And when you get married, you barely get back from the honeymoon before they start asking when you’re gonna get with the program and have kids already.  The truly clueless go a step further and ask, “Why don’t you have kids yet?  What’s the matter?  Are you having problems?”   As newlyweds, we took it in stride and joked about it a lot at first.  We told people that we were going to add a year’s delay every time we were asked that question.  What a foolish joke.  Then the questions started to sting, and we started making a list of  comebacks. “We saw how you turned out and decided against it” was my favorite (John came up with that) but I never had the courage to use it.  That’s probably for the best. 

As time passed and still we had no children, most of the questions stopped, and in their place were pitying glances and “Christian” platitudes.  I could feel the eyes of speculation upon me, and I almost went crazy imagining whispered assumptions behind my back.  It was during this time that God began to reveal to me how deep and debilitating my fear of man’s opinion had grown.  Even now, I fear to write this, and my mouse will hover over the “Publish” button for much longer than it should. . .and you, dear readers, are nice!

I volunteered to give my testimony at our ladies’ fellowship group this month, and I plan to speak about my struggles of the past few years.  I believe God would have me speak of it.  I am not ashamed of my story.  I feel no need to justify the path we took.   But I am afraid.  (And as an education major and a speech minor, I am not afraid of public speaking.)  You see, I am most definitely a work in progress, and I am afraid of what they will think of me if I tell the truth about all the cracks and broken parts of me.

But then there is God.  There is God and His glorious grace that has been revealed to me over and over in its all-sufficiency!  His grace has taught me that I do not need to  fear the judgment of others.  His grace has shown me that I am His child, and because I am His child, I am completely accepted in Him and by Him.   And that’s really the most important part of my story.  My story is just beginning, but it’s not about me.  It’s about what God wants to do, has done, in me.

Ephesians 1:3-6   Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ:  According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:  Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.

They might.

But there’s no going back now.  I said I would tell it, and it’s time to tell it.

For years I have avoided the baby section of any store, only daring to enter when I was shopping for a baby shower gift.   We were shocked and overjoyed to find out that we were expecting–that finally, I was pregnant.  We were triply shocked and overwhelmed when we learned we were having three babies!  A big part of me thought it would never happen, that God had a different plan for us.  We were, and are, so overcome with gratefulness over God’s blessing, that we’ve been thinking and talking of little else.   But I needed that moment in Target to remember.   I needed to remember my own season of infertility.  And I needed to mourn it.  I needed to remember how I felt every time a dear friend or sister announced her happy news–to remember it is possible to rejoice with another and mourn your own loss.  (Because, infertility IS loss.  It may not be the same kind of loss as a miscarriage or another death, but every negative pregnancy test is pain, disappointment, and loss.  It’s a paradox, to feel loss over something you’ve never had, but nevertheless it is true.)  I needed to remember dear friends who, I know deep down, are feeling that same conflict of joy for me and sorrow for themselves at my own happy news.  I needed to remember there are women who feel that way, and no one has ANY IDEA how they are suffering inside.  Single women who look at my happy marriage, and wonder if God’s plan includes that for them.  Women who are struggling privately through infertility, or a recent miscarriage, or the as yet unfulfilled desire for another child.  I needed to remember them.

And I needed to remember God’s faithfulness throughout my season of heartache.  I want to tell you about it–what He has done for me.  What He has taught me.  How he has upheld me and John, and showed us the depths of His grace and His love for us.

I know I have not previously mentioned any of this here.  In fact, I stopped writing altogether for a while.  Maybe you noticed?   But I’d like to take my next few blog posts to tell you just what God has taught me, and how He has sustained me.  I hope I can find the words.