Life Is...

A friend recently reminded me that life is what happens while you are making other plans. While we were making other plans, life was handing me a sinus infection.

Of course, people with even the slightest cough are allowed nowhere near premature babies. Nor, for that matter, are such people allowed near the mother of premature babies. Suffice it to say, then, that I spent Father's Day sick, at home with my daughters.

And not, as we had planned, in Denver with my wife and all six of my children. So the girls still haven't met their brothers. I have yet to spend more than a few minutes with the boys. And I haven't really seen my wife in almost two weeks.

When we first found out we were having triplets, the doctors warned us that our lives would change dramatically between 18 and 28 weeks. My wife would go on bed rest. I would take on significantly more daily responsibility. Life, generally, would turn upside down. Though my wife was slowed a bit, she was never really on bed rest. I did have to pick up more of the slack, but it was never overwhelming.

This, as it turns out, is the first really difficult experience. The doctors told us this would happen, too - we knew the boys were likely to stay in the hospital for several days, maybe weeks, after they were born. But I'm not sure we ever really thought through what that would mean.

The girls miss their mom. I miss my wife. She misses all of us. And the triplets are still somehow not quite real to anyone but their mom, who has spent every day with them since they were born.

They'll all be home very soon. And then the eight of us will get on with figuring each other out. And it won't be long before we have a hard time remembering the difficulty of these last several days.

This too, my grandmother always told me, shall pass.