BockTriplets!

This isn’t exactly recent news… it happened about a month ago. In the boy’s bedroo, there is a border around the room with an “Old MacDonald” theme. We were in the hbit of asking the boys “Where’s the farmer? Where’s the sheep?” as we would put them to bed.

One night, Daniel babbled back to me and scanned around the room, as if to say, “Daddy’s thery are everywhere”. Then next night he did the same thing, but he pointed.

He started pointing to something in the closet, and I walked over and started asking, “is this what you want?” and he got all excited, bouncing as if to say “I’m communicating! He understands me!”

By the next day both his brothers were pointing at stuff too.

Left to Right: Anthony, Christopher, Daniel

The boys had their first hair cut at Daddy’s barber, Saturday September 13th. The barber and the boys were awsome. Not a tear was shed, not even by Mom – well the barber almost shed a tear when he saw 15 month old triplets come into his shop.

This Saturday was their first birthday, which I didn’t realize until it was upon me, combines three of my favorite things – the kids, cake baking, and photography.

No matter how many pictures I took, I couldn’t get one with all the hats on and all of them looking at me. After about 500 shots, I stopped trying.

I baked and decorated the Elmo head cake too – although it was the first time they had ever seen something like that, so I don’t think they realized it was food. Not that it matters much, as everything ends up in their mouths anyway. I wanted to just sit them around it and have them make a mess of it, but Lorna wouldn’t let me.

A few months ago we took the kids up to the Philadelphia area to see their great grandmother, Gee (Joan Simonin). Here are pictures of Anthony and Christopher, and a video of Daniel.

It has been about 2 weeks since Christopher took his first steps, but he still gets around most of the time by crawling. If we stand him up, he’ll take a few, but he gets back on his hands and knees after a step or two… it is simply faster, and he can’t let his brothers get to toys ahead of him. In fact, they are all pretty much doing that now.

Yesterday, Lorna took the kids to “Born to Read”, a class at our local library with a bunch of other kids at various ages. Today she tells me he is getting up and walking around more, apparently because he saw the older kids doing it yesterday.

The kids have all been standing for a few weeks, shimmying along the rails of their cribs, and once or twice even took a step in order to keep their balance… but hadn’t actually taken a step with the intent of getting somewhere – until last night.

I was holding Christopher, and he was fussing a little. Every time Lorna would walk by, he would outstretch his arms and cry. So Lorna sat down about 5 feet away, outstretched her arms, and called. I stood him up right in front of me.

He stood there, teetering for a second, doing his upset-sounding cough-cry. Then he stepped forward. He took three controlled steps, at which point he put his hand in hers and sat down.

Last year I started a company with a couple of friends. One of the coolest things we have done is build MonkeySee.com, a how-to video website.

I was just showing it to my mom when I found they had created a whole bunch of parenting how-to videos. One series is all about beach safety, which is going to be cool to have when we go to Long Beach Island this summer.

I think I’m going to submit my own video though, “How to chase down three crawling babies at once.”

I’m putting them to work early. Anthony, Christopher and Daniel are seen here building a playdate scheduling application with Ruby on Rails.

Here’s a video of Anthony and Christopher from this weekend (Daniel was up getting his bath). They are at the age where they make a beeline for whatever is interesting them and put it straight into their mouths… so I wondered… what would happen if I put the video camera on the floor?

Update: I updated the video with 2 clips from Daniel, although he has to compete with Anthony in the first take and Christopher in the second.