Expanding the blog...

For a few years now I've been thinking about starting a blog about pediatric physical therapy and all the super fun ways I've found to help kiddos develop their gross motor skills.  But I just never got started. Since the babies have been born I've been taking lots of videos of them, specifically trying to capture all the little stages of their gross motor development. I'm a total PT mom geek, I know! I was also thinking that some day I'd love to be an adjunct instructor at the university level and teach a class on motor development. If that ever happens, I'd love to have videos of the kiddos to use.

Also since the babies were born, I've been watching their development like a hawk and have tried to incorporate lots of motor development activities into our daily routines. As an early intervention therapist that's what I try to help families do so I figured I'd better be able to walk the walk and not just talk the talk!  

So the other day I thought, "Hey, why not add all of this info to the blog?"  That way  I can actually use all the videos I've been taking and potentially provide a useful educational tool for other families with infants, whether preemies or not, since the activities are the same. And I figure, if we can do these things with triplets, then they must be pretty do-able!  The other great thing is that we have three babies who are all doing things on their own schedule and in their own way, so we'll get to see some of the wonderful variation that exists within typical motor development, albeit on the preemie schedule.  So I'm going to start doing Motor Mondays and post about motor development every Monday.  I was asking Michelle, Hope and Marty which day I should do for the theme posts and Marty suggested that I do "Torture Tuesdays!"  She's basing this on the fact that every day I get the kiddos on their tummies and they don't always love it. =)  If you have suggestions for topics or motor development or questions you have wondered about feel free to comment or send me an email on my personal email or at TherrienTripleThreat<at>gmail.com!

I've recently started adding labels or tags with key word to the posts to help people find the posts that interest them so if this isn't your thing you can skip them and not miss out in the posts loaded with smiley baby pics. I'm still learning about this whole blogging thing but my goal is to have pages that categorize posts by topic so posts to highlight ones that might be of particular interest to other MoMs (Mothers of Multiples) or ones related to motor development.  I've recruited my brother's girldfriend Vicky, who just finished a graphic design program, to help me redesign the blog too.  I'm looking forward to all these changes!

Last week I found a group online called "How Do You Do It?"  for and by MoMs that shares "day-to-day realities, joys and challenges of raising trins, triplets and more." I emailed the organizer to add our blog to the blogroll and she read our blog and invited me to be a regular contributor to the blog!  Another fun "outreach" thing from this week is that I saw a post on Facebook from a lactation consultant who was looking for LGBTQ families to share their stories.  She is doing a presentation on LGBTQ issues at a national conference to help LCs do a better job of serving our community.  So I emailed her and she is very excited to include us in her presentation and wants to share the blog and some pictures from the blog in her presentation.  We think this is pretty great and are happy to be able to help other families like, even if it is indirectly!  Like our welcome message on the blog says, the primary reasons for starting the blog was to share information with friends and families and document our story for the kiddos, but also to help other expecting triplet families and I think these connections will help make that third purpose more likely by getting more people checking out the blog.  If you have other ideas for me on spreading the word please shoot me an email, I'd love to hear them!  Keep your eyes peeled for some of these changes in the coming weeks!

Oh, and here are some cute baby picture just for fun!

Chillin' in Isaiah's crib waiting for a diaper change

"We should party in your crib more often bro!"

Ellie enjoying her fingers (on her left hand of course)

All 3 kiddos are partial to this "left hand in the mouth, right
hand by the ear" pose