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Eating a lot, getting fatter, and pooping all over ourselves...

But I suppose I should tell you about the kids. I mean, you don't come to this blog to hear about Suzy and me.

Man, so much has happened since last I posted, which is the main reason I haven't posted for so long. Let's see, the babies got their first round of shots, and they went through subsequent fevers. Wow, were they crying. I just held the bottle lightly in Kiefer's mouth, and he would wail and wail, take a few tugs, and then wail again. Poor guy. And one day before that, Suzy got a crazy fever herself--was shivering, shaking all over the place: one of the symptoms of mastitis. Yea, it was a rough couple of nights. Thanks to Kory and Martha though, we were able to nip the mastitis in the bud: got antibiotics, and Suzy didn't have much trouble after that (--but now we know that Suzy and not One Hung Low wrote the epic thriller "Broken Bra Strap").

Oh, and the mastitis hit while Suzy was at a shower organized by Carol MacDougal. The shower was wonderful and noteworthy all by itself, and that's without mentioning how the van got stuck in the snow...

That's right, the biggest fall snow storm in Colorado's history suddenly struck that same day while Suzy was en route. But, in the end, the storm was great: the kids got their first real taste of what it means to live here--if, that is, you don't include the suffocating congestion that apparently is a result of our dry climate. Oh, and I also had school cancelled on Thursday, which was nice, my first snowday with my own children--better than all the rest; even though, the nicest part about it was the thought and hope that it might happen many times in the future. The little ones are a bit too young still to enjoy snowday activities--I mean, they didn't seem very amused at all when I rolled them down a hill to see how big a snowball each would make.

Anyway, Carol's shower was scheduled to coincide with the arrival of our favorite mail-in Japanese aunt, Katy Williams. Poor Katy--she pretty much stepped off the plane and got sick herself. She spent most of her lone week here wearing a mask, dealing with jet lag, connecting with family and friends, and collecting some goods to take back to Japan, all while taking care of Leopold, her five-month-old spaghetti-legged happy albino son. (Check out the pictures: Leopold is the hairless Titan threatening to gobble up our three little Olympians--a happy happy Titan, but still...)

Jeeze, what else? Oh yea, the triplets made the paper--the high school paper The Pioneer, to be exact. I have been trying to upload a copy of the article here, but can't figure it out--the title of this post is as far as I got. But I'll keep trying. It was a fun article, put together by two or three of my AP students. In it, the babes were called "the gleesome threesome." I liked that. And yes, they are gleesome. Kiefer (or George) is smiling all the time--even at two in the morning. Charlie successfully peed all over my back while I was giving Scout a bath (--nice aim, Chris). And Scout, well, she's always just chilling out with those baby blues, even while we're ladling her runny stools. Seriously, today I felt like Oliver: "More soup, please?" And just this morning, all three of them started sleeping without being swaddled. Right when you thought they couldn't get any cuter, you walk in and see the boys holding hands. (And they may indeed be identical--seem to be tending in that direction...)

Oh, and the new measurements are in--since the shots, anyway, which were two weeks ago already (--time keeps on slipping slipping slipping...):

Scout was 7 lbs, 15 ons.

Charlie was 9 lbs even.

And Kiefer was 9 lbs, 8 ons.

But here's the thing, Scout was the tallest of the bunch--and she's not tall--off the charts short, in fact, which means Kiefer is almost perfectly round. (The pediatric nurses call our kids the Hollywood triplets, by the way. Kiefer and Scout, I guess, have some connections.) But that was two weeks ago. I wonder how they measure up now, and what they're called.

Anyway, here's my latest insight: we're all infants. I feared Suzy and I were regressing--assimilating infancy for being outnumbered as we are. No, we aren't really pooping on ourselves--yet. But I have caught glimpses (or thought for a moment I should have, if I were in front of a mirror), in which we do something just like one of the babies, stretching, or smirking--as we pass gas--I don't know, just little instances I can't really name. Like once, I looked at Suzy while she was sleeping, and her arms and hands were above her head, and I thought, Hey, that's Scout! I had to kiss her. It's amazing seeing your child in your wife, and not the other way around. These glimpses recurred enough to make me wonder, Am I going to start peeing on my own head soon? And then, today, it hit me: we're all infants, no matter how old we are. I'm not talking about Emerson's "Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it." No, at certain moments, like when you sleep, or when you start from a dead sleep, or when you stretch, or how you thrust your tongue forward when you concentrate, or how you embrace or nestle into the embrace of an intimate friend--right there, for a sliver of a moment, you are new born, totally dependent, but trusting, and utterly content--smiling in your sleep beneath a soft, quiet kiss. It's not that Suzy or I, or anyone else, is imitating one of the triplets, like when Grandma D gets lost in "This Is How the Farmer Goes...". No, it's that the triplets give us a means to understand ourselves a bit better.

Ha, that reminds me of a piece I wrote many years ago--in college--I had just completed a night of babysitting for a neighbor:

"God attends to us in our infancy--she rattles the world on a stick and sings unintelligible cosmic patterns; and she sees greater prospect in us than we could ever realize. We depart from her for dignity, and she lets us go--we do our best to stand where our feet find grounds. But still, one glance into an infant's eyes recalls, if only vaguely, what it was to be suspended in her arms, and what it is to be believed in more than any of all of us can believe in anything."

I didn't title it then, but to title it now, I'd call it, "Thanks Ma."

And thanks to you for your patience. Remember, I am always (and apparently have always been) coming back to this. More updates are coming.

Take care, dear friends.