Four Month Developmental Update...

Well the big developmental appointment has come and gone. I'm still recovering and I even had a helper with me! :) Taking the babies out for more than 30-45 minutes at a time is a task and requires lots of prep. I was so anxious about the appointment that I woke up an hour before the babies, 5am, and started into overdrive. The prep and organization that went into the appointment didn't cause nearly as much anxiety as worrying about their naps. They really needed to be well-rested and naps don't go very well at our house. SURPRISINGLY, all three babies slept for about two hours that morning which was great because I was able to get SO much stuff done and they were definitely ready to go and show off for the doctor.

The babies corrected age is almost six months but since they were born early, developmentally their age is adjusted to be four months. When they all discharged from the NICU they received a referral to see a developmental pediatrician. There are NO shots given at this appointment for which I'm grateful. Those will be coming in a couple weeks. This particular pediatrician spends individual time with each baby and tests different areas to see where each baby is at according to their adjusted or corrected age. The different areas are gross/fine motor and receptive/expressive language.

She tested how well the babies tracked objects, how expressive they were with smiling/laughing/cooing, how they interacted with her and if they paid attention to her while she spoke, whether they turned to the sound of a bell, their ability to hold up their heads, roll over, sit, and whether they grabbed/reached for objects hanging above them. Then she did height, weight, and head measurements. I had fed the babies pureed carrots a couple hours before the appointment but all the josseling around during the evaluations caused all of them to spit up what they had eaten. So they had carrots and formula all over themselves. Gross. That's why they wear onesies everyday at home instead of actual outfits. The spitting is out of control. That's also why I have considered wearing a poncho because I am CONSTANTLY covered. I have more laundry then they do usually. Anyway, I kept apologizing to her that they had carrots all over them like it was some big deal or something. Obviously it wasn't. I want my babes to be in pristine condition when we go out! I'm learning that is not a reality. :)

Moving on. Here are the results of the evaluations. I feel they are more subjective than anything. For example, Caleb goes to town underneath the activity gym with grabbing everything that is hanging. When she dangled a red ring above him he just layed there. Like he was totally not amused by her toy. So of course he scored low in that area when REALLY it is probably one of his strongest areas. He's so good with his hands. It was hilarious though. Just totally gave her a blank stare.

Their weights were taken WITH clothes and with FULL diapers which, I believe, can add at least a few ounces. Also,the percentiles are with their corrected age.


CALEB:

Gross Motor: 5 months
Receptive Language: 5 months
Fine Motor: 4 months
Expressive Language: 4 months

Weight: 18 pounds (50-75th percentile)
Length: 25.5 inches (10-25th percentile)
Head: 45 cm (90th percentile)

His height is no longer keeping up with his head growth. Ha! Yeah he is almost hitting the weight limit on his car seat. I'm looking into buying another one. NEVER thought that would be the case.


ZACHARY:

Gross Motor: 4-5 months
Receptive Language: 5 months
Fine Motor: 4 months
Expressive Language: 4 months

Weight: 13 lbs 6 oz (10th percentile)
Length: 24 inches (10-25th percentile)
Head: 41.5 (50th percentile)

We did talk about the shape of his head and the fact that his ears are not even. She didn't seem concerned and made no recommendations for him to be evaluated by a cranial specialist. I mean, I'd like him to have a nice head shape just because he's a boy and won't have long locks to cover up irregularities. I'd like him to be able to shave his head and not feel weird that one side of his head is flatter than the other. HOWEVER, I sleep him on the side that isn't as far forward and it has helped IMMENSELY in evening him out. His unevenness used to be much worse so I'm happy with the progress and all we can do it keep working with him.


LEAH:

Gross Motor: 4-5 months
Receptive Language: 5 months
Fine Motor: 4 months
Expressive Language: 4 months

Weight: 14 lbs 10 oz (50th percentile)
Length: 24 inches (50th percentile)
Head: 41.5 cm (90th percentile)

I'm hoping she grows hair soon because she has an unusually large head. She does have ONE REALLY long hair. Don't know how or when that happened but I hope it is a sign that more hair is coming! She hasn't really found her voice yet and SOMETIMES gives me a laugh. Other than that though she is very observational and quiet.

Basically all the babies are making steady gains in growth and nice progress with their development. Keeping right up with their adjusted age of 4 months. No further evaluations were needed and we'll go back at their one year birthday to see how they're doing. I'm definitely happy with the results and am constantly impressed with how quickly the babies learn and how much they absorb from their environment. She did encourage us to use their names as often as we can and also work on their sitting abilities as they are all getting closer to sitting on their own.

Here they all are in the octopus outfits showing off their Bumbo skills before the appointment. Lighting wasn't good because it was 6:30am. I thought I'd get more pictures at the appointment but that didn't happen. Plus they had carrots all over themselves which doesn't make for a very cute picture.


Lastly, I have a serious question. Are gowns for boys more on the....femmy side? I'm never sure but sometimes they seem to look so comfortable so why should the boys miss out?? I'm really am curious though if gowns on boys are kind of weird.

Baby It's Cold Outside...

Well it was....now it's in the 70's this week. Hallelujah! We've had strange weather recently here in Texas. With all the ice, snow, and rolling blackouts, we were all pretty much home bound. We don't go anywhere anyway but the fact that we COULD NOT if we needed to was depressing. I don't get cabin fever very bad compared to Clark who gets ancy with one day not going anywhere (guess it's probably good I was the one lying in the hospital bed for over two months :) but all this cold weather has definitely given me a bad case of the fever. To top that off, the babies refuse to all be sleeping/awake at the same time so even going for a drive can get tricky with their naps. Luckily RSV season is soon to be over and good weather is on the way. I don't think I could stay cooped up for much longer. I'm hoping they will become better nappers as the time goes on too. Who knows.

SO...

since we were all iced/snowed in, I decided it would be a great time to do errands! These are house errands and the babies actually enjoy it. I put them all in the triplet stroller and push them from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom to the family room to the laundry room doing all sorts of tasks and errands on the way. We stop and they look around while I do whatever I'm doing then we go to another area. I think they like looking at something new once in a while.

Here's the mammoth triplet stroller. I love, love, love it! It was GENEROUSLY given to be by a member of my church who didn't have triplets but three small children. I am SO grateful because these things are not cheap. The trio isn't quite ready for it yet because they have to be able to sit up but around the house it isn't a big deal. I just prop with blankets. I can't wait to take this thing out regularly! That is Zachary in front. Don't be confused by the pink blanket. I grab what is within my reach. Leah second, Caleb third.


While we were already trying out some new fun things, we decided to try out the triplet table too!!! Get excited for lots of pictures in this thing...


Again, they aren't quite ready for it, plus they aren't eating solid food anyway. They kept throwing their heads around and hitting them on the plastic seats. We'll try this again another time. :) Fun to see what's ahead though. Great Grandma and Grandpa got this for the trio and we think it is SO awesome. The babies did too.

We also tried out the Bumbos! We have put them in occasionally to see how they are progressing with their head and back strength. During the snow days they were looking pretty good! They do fatigue pretty quick though so we don't do the Bumbos for long.




The temperature was seriously so cold here for a few days. Our home is old and drafty so I was worried that the babies were too cold. Because I swaddle the heck out of them at night I don't dress them very warm for sleeping. But during the day we busted out these fleece sleep sacs which were PERFECT for the cold days. My friend who also had triplets gave these to me. She had two girls and a boy...hence the colors. Zachary wore his yellow just fine though!


The babies liked to keep up to date with all the snowfall other places. Caleb got online to see what was going on and couldn't believe the snow in Chicago. CRAZY!




The babies also liked chillaxing in the swings. I put Zachary on a silk blanket in the swing and came back to this...

He was almost out! He's a little squirmer.


We also did lots of reading. This picture is not a great representation since it is VERY rare to have all three babies awake the same time and have them be alert also. Usually one is tired or eating or whatever. So when they are all awake it's fun to read.


Now that the weather has turned around, we ventured in the backyard and sat under some umbrellas. Leah and Zachary are terribly sensitive to bright lights so I had to use dark blankets over the umbrellas. That seemed to do the trick. They all liked being outside though. Caleb laid out there for almost an hour! Leah was just concerned about getting a little sun to her legs. She's got to get ready for swimsuit season!


The babies wanted to wish everyone a happy love day! Three times the love here at our house (Caleb has serious camera phobia. He has the CUTEST, gummiest smile but as soon as the camera appears, his smile disappears).

Five Months...

Well I would like to proudly say that by five months (14.5 weeks adjusted age), all three babies have slept 12 hours at night twice. HALLELUJAH!! Naps are a different story and I'll touch on that in a different post. Soooo we've hit a great milestone here at the Rudd house! Every night is different with problems like Zachary waking up for a pacifier several times, Leah waking up because her one good nostril is clogged, Caleb waking up at 4am and wanting to play, etc... but we can finally see some light and hope that in the next couple months the babies will be more consistent with their sleep durations. Unfortunately I have had to stay up all night, many nights, working on the babies sleep patterns these past few months. Once I would get one down, another one would wake up an hour later. Or if I was encouraging a certain baby to sleep rather than eat, I had to be fully awake on pacifier duty while possibly soothing and feeding another. LUCKILY I have NOT been undertaking this monstrous 'sleeping through the night' task alone. In fact, I have not been without help since the babies came home four months ago! There has always been an extra set of hands whether it was my Dad, Mom, Clark's Mom, the night nanny, or Clark (all at separate times), so that come 6am I was able to crawl into bed and sleep for 5-6 hours while one of them would take baby duty. We were sure sad to see our night nanny go after six weeks that's for sure! When she left, we were JUST starting to encourage Caleb to sleep for four hours at night rather than three. Wow. Seems like eons ago. Point is, there is NO WAY I could've cared for three babies, stayed up all night with them, and started all over the next day without help. No way. Clark and I are so grateful for our family members who have sacrificed their time, sleep, and money to come to Texas and jump into the chaos going on here. We can truly never repay them because seriously, it was pretty crazy around here for a while. My mom was reminding me what life was like for the first few weeks after the babies came home and honestly I hardly remember any of it!!! It is such a blur now and I'll be honest again, I hope to never have to experience the first few months with three babies at the same time again! HA! I'm SO glad we are finally at this point. The guest room is empty now with the exception of Clark's sisters coming in a few weeks. I'm so excited for what lies ahead in the coming months and all the milestones the babies will reach. They truly are amazing human beings and I can't believe we have three of them. Really....I still can't believe it. :)

By the time I finally got to working with Zachary and his sleeping through the night, I started to get real inconsistent with when I fed him overnight, how long I let him cry, etc... I think it was because by the third kid, I was just so anxious to get him to 12 hours that I skipped a lot of vital steps I practiced with the other two. I showed a lot of consistency with Caleb and Leah and they were having successful stretches of sleep right away. We had one REALLY bad night with Zachary. He slept from 6-10pm then cried from 10-12am, then woke up and cried at 2am, 4am, and 5:30am. The next night.....he slept from 6pm-4am, the next night he slept all the way through! This was all the while Caleb and Leah had been sharing a room. Apparently Leah is a loud sleeper. Typically from 5-6am she thrashes and groans but is still asleep. Unfortunately this would wake Caleb and he would start to cry which woke Leah all the way. So for three nights they were up crying around 5am. Yuck. Caleb is now in our closet and doing much better. Fortunately for him he'll move into the guest room as soon as Clark can move the crib. You'd think a four bedroom house would be big enough for three kids!! Nope, someone still ended up sleeping in a closet. :) We actually don't mind him in the closet because he is so quiet. He does sometimes wake up in the 5am hour but just lays there quietly. Such a sweet boy.

It's so interesting to think back to when we were house hunting. We were surprised at how few homes there were to choose from and the ones that were available in our price range weren't in the condition we'd hoped. So we viewed our current home the first day it had been on the market and didn't actually have it on our 'to look at' list. We put in an offer that night, as it was in our price range, with someone else's offer and luckily ours was accepted! It had four bedrooms which was kind of awkward because it was just me and Clark. We planned on having a workout room, sauna room, candy room, theater, etc... You name it, we were going to have it in one of our many rooms. Sadly, months went by and nothing happened with the rooms. We got lots of questions about why we bought such a big house and we always answered that it was just put right in front of us so we couldn't pass it up. Little did we know all the rooms would be filled a little over a year later! Strange....we know this home has been a HUGE blessing in all of this though. Crazy how things work out.

Here's some other five-month tidbits. Not much has changed since their four month mark. I've tried several times again to do rice with Zachary but he is clearly not ready. Oh, he is still eating fine and we are still using the Simply Thick. I'll probably change over to rice cereal as a thickener here in another month or so. Leah could really use a thickener in her bottles as well (I've been using half Simply Thick packets for her) so I'll probably use the rice cereal in her bottle soon. She does eat some vegetables at night with Caleb. All we've tried so far is squash. They seemed to like it all right but I know their little bodies are having to adjust to food which makes for some uncomfortable gas at times.

This past month a record was set in our house....

I changed FOUR dirty diapers in about 30 minutes. Seriously? They decided to make my life really interesting all at the same time.

I have been trying a couple different formulas. I used up all my free Enfamil, and since it is more pricey, wanted to change to a cheaper brand. I tried Costco and felt like it was such a thick, frothy formula. Enfamil was so smooth and I was obviously used to that. So I trialed Walmart Parent's Choice and that seems to be comparable to Enfamil's consistency although it smells so weird. I can't hardly smell it once it's mixed and wonder how these babies want to drink it every four hours. They do though. That's all that matters I guess.

We're moving along though and six months will be here before we know it! Here's some five month pics... The third one isn't that great of Leah but it makes me laugh. Check out their new five-month picture on the sidebar too!






*Photos courtesy of Gram