One Week of Bed Rest Down

                                            We've made it one full week of bed rest!

Laura connected with many family and friends near and far via social media.  Hannah's figuring out how to stay over night at the hospital some nights/visit home daily/be at work full time.  We were wowed by wonderful dinner visit "love feast communion" time with friends every night!  Laura's eaten tons of great meals (6 times a day/every 2 hours).  Laura and babies heart beats are monitored 

3x a day for about an hour and a half. 

 

She keeps herself comfortable and distracted in new ways...one of which is to hang with her friend Bunny (a close cousin to our niece's stuffed Bunny who looks alike but is blue and yellow and is also named Bunny). Above- Bunny on the belly with the 4 monitors.  The telly is set constantly on the 

patient care ambient music/nature footage channel- Laura's current calming obsession!

  

The bed after a long session of being monitored.  Can you tell where Laura was laying?

Room service food is supplemented by the great food friends bring.  Here- Laura ate dining service gyro meat with her avocado, local salad and gluten-free bread for the biggest bite possible!

                         Our friend Becca loves on the babies.  She will be our long term
                                                    doula helper when the babies come home!

                                             Our youngest visitor baby Daelyn comes to visit
                                                    over dinner with her momma Meredith!

Lewis Fuller celebrates our anniversary with us every year.  He had breakfast 7am at Flying Biscuit restaurant with us early May 23rd when I was discharged from the hospital (visited for an hour monitoring the then undetectable little leak that first began at 4am...
  
One week later, Lewis walked over from his condo 2 blocks away from the hospital to celebrate making it 7 days more here & we enjoyed incredible Whole Foods takeout breakfast Hannah delivered!

Lewis is our long term spiritual friend/counsel, our on call emergency contact for delivery (Yes- I said above he lives 2 blocks from this hospital- a coincidence? A miracle?), and last but not least he is the proudest godfather to be for baby John!

Friends and family inspire us to keep on keeping on! Tomorrow is week 31- 

we'll post celebrating baby growth...

Laura and the babies have had a couple of uneventful days, which is great! Laura is finished with the IV antibiotics, which is also great because she no longer has the IV in her arm, so she feels more comfortable and free. The antibiotics are just precautionary to prevent infection as baby A's bag of waters is open and leaking amniotic fluid.

Laura's days are full of baby monitoring, Skype calls, journaling and texting now.  Monitoring the babies' heart beats is comforting but when the babies start to bounce around under the monitors it can be uncomfortable though hilarious.  You may get a text while they're being monitored because that's one way she can distract herself.  The babies get monitored three times a day for at least 20 minutes each.  Recently, though, they're moving around so that it takes longer, sometimes an hour, to get the monitor on them all (and make sure each monitor is on a separate baby).  

Here's what it looks like when the monitors get all hooked up.  The leg cuffs pictured below pump up with air and help with blood circulation.  The nurses jokingly call the leg treatment the "Emory Spa".

I've been bringing stuff from home to make it feel cozier and more homelike, in the hope that Laura will feel as comfy as possible and have everything she wants.  As you can see, we're moving in! 

Find it odd that this is posted early in the dawning hours?  That is because the babies wake Laura early with the need to feed.  Dining service ordering starts at 6:30am but delivers closer to 8am, so she has to place her order while having her 1st breakfast.  Todays' waking snack of choice includes delicious smoked canned oysters (Thanks Lewis!) with Swedish Wasabröd crackers & Babybel cheese...mmm!?!? This also happens to be a current bedtime meal of choice.  Her body is preparing her well for the impending constant fed/sleep needs of the babies' to come!

Ways to help

We're having a lovely morning with the sun streaming in the window as we eat breakfast together.

Our care committee is helping organize some help with meals, so if you'd like to visit us in the hospital, please visit our VolunteerSpot website http://vols.pt/z7Spai and sign up to bring us dinner one evening and stay to visit a little.

The hospital food is ok, but isn't quite enough of the things Laura needs to keep growing three strong babies, so having a homemade dinner will go a long way to keeping all of us healthy and happy.  There are details on the VolunteerSpot about Laura's current dietary needs.

Thank you all for all your support and love through this process.  If it takes a village to raise one child, we feel as if it'll take a metropolis to raise our three.  We feel so lucky to have a metropolis of love and support here, and would love to see those of you who can visit during what we hope will be a long time in the hospital while the babies grow in utero!

Hospital update

The latest update is that Laura and the babies are in the hospital for the duration.

Friday May23rd, (yesterday) was our five year Quaker wedding anniversary!  Just after our anniversary dinner, Laura had some tiny gushes of water.  When we got to the hospital to check things out, it became clear that Charlie had broken his water.  Laura's not in labor, though, so the babies can all potentially stay in for quite awhile still.  It turns out that the amniotic fluid re-fills, so even though his bag of waters is leaky, it's getting re-filled!

What this means is that Laura is in the hospital for as long as she is pregnant, which we're hoping is still quite awhile.  

There are lots of possibilities in our future, including a chance that Charlie might be born first, leaving John and Peggy in utero for longer.  There's no way to know what the future holds for all of us, but for right now all is good and everyone is healthy and well.

Here are some pictures of hospital action:

Laura modeling her lovely blue gown as she got checked in Friday night.

 Many, many thanks to Lewis Fuller, who got us snacks at 11pm on Friday so Hannah didn't need to leave the hospital.  Since Laura has to eat every 2 hours and hospital food isn't always available or delicious, snacks are crucial to her health and happiness.  Laura and the babies love the greek yogurt and sardines with mustard and dill, although not usually together.

Christina Repoley and Dean Leeper (and their baby in utero) came to visit us this evening and brought a delicious taco dinner.  It was so lovely to have delicious homemade food and good company.

 Laura with the cream container from dessert- "Made Right Here". Check out the lovely cards and flowers to cheer Laura during the day.  Laura brought the three peace cranes from our Babies Shower along to the antepartum room to symbolize the three babies.  Here she's sitting on the couch that flips over and turns into Hannah's bed (and is pretty comfy, too).

We have had some visitors, which is lovely, but please check with us before coming over so we don't get too overtired, since it's hard to sleep well at the hospital.  At this point the most helpful thing seems to be for people to sign up to bring us dinner in the evenings so that we can both visit with friends and Hannah doesn't have to spend time away from the hospital at home cooking.  Our care committee will be setting up a website where people can sign up to bring us meals, or help in other ways. As soon as that's set up, we will post the link in case folks want to help out.

We are so grateful to live when and where we do, and to have such a great community of support. Our doctor is wonderfully optimistic, which is so helpful.  All of the residents and nurses have been so friendly and helpful, too. As hospitals go, we're pretty comfortable here, and grateful that Laura and the babies are getting such good care.

Ultrasound 5/23/2014

Our ultrasound on May 23rd was good, everyone's heart sounded normal, and Laura's cervix looked unchanged (not thinning or funneling, which would indicate a high likelihood of going into labor).

One of the funny things about ultrasounds is that the bigger the babies get, the harder it is to see them in the ultrasound, partly because you can't see all of any of them in the picture.  The funny part is that they're feeling more like babies with hard bones, but looking less and less like babies in the ultrasounds.

Pretty much every time Laura has an ultrasound at SeeBaby, one of the babies is kicking another one.  This time we caught a picture of it.  This hard to see picture is of Charlie kicking John in the head.  John's head is on the right side of the picture, and Charlie's foot is on top of his head.  An image of our futures....

27 weeks 5 days baby update

Laura and the babies had another ultrasound today, and it was the one where they do the monthly weight and growth measurements.  The babies are all curled up in 'fetal position', so we couldn't really see their faces and there weren't too many great pictures this time around.  I will post the best ones soon, though.

Babies A and B are head down, which is great, because their ability to move around and flip is rapidly decreasing, so hopefully they'll both stay there for the duration.  Baby C is still kind of lying across the other two, with her head kind of in Baby B's feet.

The good news is that everyone is growing well, and Laura's doing great.  Laura isn't showing any signs of early labor, which is awesome!

The overview is that everyone is doing well and growing well and there's nothing to be worried about (YAY!!)  There was a lot of kicking today, including babies kicking each other, which was entertaining to watch once we realized that they are each protected by their sacs and fluid.

So without further ado, here are the current baby stats:

Baby A (Charlie Libert):
             2 lbs, 11 oz
             28 weeks, 2 days
             139 FHT (heartbeat) (normal range- between 110-190)
             amniotic fluid 3.55 (normal range - 2-8)
              65th percentile (normal- between 10% and 90%)

Baby B (John Lewis):
            2lbs, 11oz
            28 weeks
            134 heartbeat
            amniotic fluid 8.79
            62nd percentile

Baby C (Peggy Lucretia):
           2lbs, 7 oz
           27 weeks, 2 days
           155 heartbeat
           amniotic fluid 8.26
           36th percentile


So you can see that the babies don't weigh exactly the same anymore, but they're still growing well and similarly, and most importantly, they are all well within normal ranges. Also, the percentiles are for singleton babies, not triplets.

All in all, another great ultrasound, and great stats for mom and babies.

dancing babies video

10 Weeks - All three babies visible dancing and growing together!

The growing belly

Here are some pictures of Laura's belly over the past several months- oh how those babies are growing!!

Christmas at Laura's grandparents Howard and Connie's house- 9 weeks pregnant

11 weeks

12 weeks - at Lake Acworth, Georgia

              

 13 weeks and still laughing!!

                     

15 weeks

                              

 15.5 weeks- enjoying the rare snow in Atlanta! 

                          

 16 weeks

                                                                    

17 weeks with friend Meredith, who had her baby three days later!

 17 weeks

18 weeks

18 weeks with our support committee

25 weeks!!

26.5 weeks

27 weeks

 So here we are- at 27 weeks and counting!

Friends Meeting Baby Shower

Our Care Committee from the Friends Meeting put together a wonderful babies shower for us on April 26th.  Laura's parents Wayne and Jana came to celebrate for the weekend, too.

Here are a few of our favorite photos from the shower. Thanks to Mindy for her amazing photography skills!

Many thanks to our sister in law Steff for the cute three peas cake topper and names!

 Grampy Wayne with the triple stroller.

 Our triple snap-n-go stroller with all three car seats in it!!

 Thanks to Jana for helping make these super cute pennants- we plan to use these for many birthdays.

 Thanks to everyone who came and shared their favorite lullabies with us- we had such a good time singing with you all!

We feel so lucky to have such a loving, supportive and generous community, and we can't wait for our babies to get to experience the love we got from you all at our shower.  Thank you all!