No church on Easter

It's Easter Sunday.

This afternoon we drove out to "The Ranch" for a family lunch (Amber's side). "The Ranch" is owned by some of her kin and is located in the rolling hills of Central Texas (more beautiful than you might think, if you've been to Waco); we enjoyed our drive out, especially because the girls slept for a good part of it. Quiet drives are nice, but rare. Heck, quiet anything is rare around our house.

The girls weren't feeling well so they were grumpy but well-cared for by many family members at the gathering, and they seemed to enjoy cruising up and down the hills in their go-anywhere, manna-from-heaven stroller. They fell asleep driving home. Ahhh, sweet naptime.

We didn't go to church. Our family hasn't been a regular at church in about a year. In the beginning, the girls kept us home since they were extremely susceptible to sickness. I was still on church staff until early fall so I attended regularly.

Once we were able to take the girls, we realized that taking them anywhere is not as trivial as we thought it might be. You can probably imagine the frantic pace and last-minute gathering of necessities -- not to mention babies -- that characterizes the 15 minutes before we pull out of the driveway. On some Sundays, the thought of that effort keeps us at home.

Also, there's this feeling I have that the Burns Party is a "disturber of the peace." We come into a place, the volume goes up, the stress level is tripled (at least), and we generally end up leaving some sort of mess. That's quite a different experience for two slightly-introverted people-pleasers to adjust to. For us, DaySpring has always been a place in which we find peace, and there is something uncomfortable about feeling as if we are disturbing that place. I know that this is something I'll have to get over. I'm sure that no one in our church would want us feeling that way, even if a few folks do take a deep breath when we walk in the door. And I think the level of chaos we bring to a place will likely get worse before it gets better. I'm just going to have to get used to our family disturbing the peace, and letting people deal with it.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing. I have a bad habit of spiraling downward into an introspective hall-of-mirrors when I begin to worry about what people think.

We'll be back in church soon enough. DaySpring is adding more nursery space which will definitely improve things, and we are moving the nursery away from the sanctuary (it's currently adjacent) which will mean that we won't sit in worship trying to identify which one of our girls is screaming in the background.

Christ is risen...He is risen indeed.

Next time: strangers get personal.

Can't think of a title

This past weekend, we went to an Easter egg hunt hosted by an lovely woman from the church where Amber grew up. Amber actually attended this same hunt as a little girl, and while we were there "Grandma F" pulled out some pictures from those many years ago. It's hard to believe that one day we'll be looking back fondly at pictures of our little girls from years gone by. Anyway, we all had a good time. Saturday night, R and J came over and brought a yummy dinner. We had a great time playing Settlers of Catan (one of our favorite games). R won.

We seem to be beyond the cold/cough crud that the girls have had the past two weeks, thank God. They are much less fun when they don't feel well.

I'm very proud of Amber. She'll be finishing her Master's Degree in Counseling this May and I'll bet money she'll be graduating with a 4.0; and she's done it while doing a great job being mom to ABC and wife to me. Amazing.

I'm officially declaring weekends as my family time. It may seem like common sense but I really haven't thought about my weekends that way until now. In one way I became a parent "overnight" but in another, more important way, I'm just beginning that transformation. Since our girls go to bed by 7 each night, the weekends are the really the only times I get to hang out with them. It feels so much better having a single priority on weekends simply because of the clarity it brings to my mind. I feel less tied to a to-do list or to the things I personally want to accomplish over the weekend, and more spontaneous and able to just enjoy life with the girls. Children have a way of bringing you down to their level, thanks be to God. I hope I never lose the ability to get below all the sh*t that comes with being an adult and enter the world of mystery, trust, and uninhibited joy that is childhood. May I always wonder what's inside the pink plastic egg hidden in the grass.

Blogging makes me uncomfortable

Honestly, it feels a little self-centered to think that people actually want to read stories about our lives. Yea, we have triplets, but so what? Everyone deals with unusual or difficult or exceptional circumstances at some point in their life. Does that mean they should write about it and expect people to care? This whole blogging thing makes me feel a little -- I dunno -- egocentric.

And I AM egocentric, to tell the truth. We are all our own little centers-of-the-universe to one degree or another. That's one of the great struggles of life...to live like we aren't the center, like the world doesn't revolve around us, to prevent ego-interference from blocking our ability to love the folks around us, love the world, live life to the full. My freakin' ego gets in the way all the freakin' time. But that's another post...

So blogging makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it's the attention; maybe it's the fact that our life feels like it's on display; maybe it's the fact that I don't want to be one of those parents who acts like the world revolves around their children, because I know it doesn't. I know that people are born and die every day. People get sick, get healed, get rich, go broke, are hungry, are oppressive, and are oppressed. People experience tragedies and miracles every day. I know that the world is so much bigger than our little party of five -- and I hope that I can teach that to my children.

Maybe the discomfort is what kept me away from the blog for so long. Maybe, in the back of my mind, I thought, "If I stop updating the blog, maybe folks will forget about us." But then maybe it was just laziness or busy-ness. I honestly don't know.

But, in spite of all this whining, here's what I've decided: I'm now viewing this blog as a private journal that just happens to be exposed to the light of day. I'm no longer writing to provide an "update" on our lives. That means I won't necessarily be writing about which baby is walking (Bella), which baby is talking (all three), which baby has diarreah (none, thank God), etc. If you'd like those kind of updates regularly, send me an email or come babysit. Instead, I'll be writing about things I want to remember, good and bad; things that I want to attempt to somehow capture in words. I do a lot of capturing in photos and video, but words seem to build memories in a much more personal and intimate way.

So if you care to continue reading, I'd love to have you along. You can even make comments if you'd like -- the new blog allows for that. We are thankful to have many people who care about us and our family, and I do not want to seem ungrateful. However, please know that I'm no longer writing for you. My audience is the future-me, sitting in the recliner on graduation day, looking through the pictures, choking back the tears, and remembering the journey that began on February 22, 2004. Hmmm...me writing for me...how egocentric.

Is green tea really good for you?

It was a normal morning in early January. Amber and I had recently resolved (as many do in January) to begin drinking green tea instead of coffee because we had read about its health benefits, and I had a fresh insulated cup of just-boiled green tea steeping on the end table (my first mistake). Aleah had a dirty diaper, so I plopped down in the middle of the living room to do the changing--we do most of our diaper changing on the floor. I was almost finished with the diaper when I scanned the room for the other girls and saw Bella crawling toward the end table where the shiny cup of green tea was waiting.

I turned my head back to Aleah to quickly finish the job (my second mistake), and by the time I turned around, hopped up, and got to Bella, she had reached the table, pulled up, and, literally half-a-second before I reached her, pulled the cup of scalding tea onto her chest and arm.

I scooped her up and immediately removed her shirt (my first non-mistake) and I was horrified to see a good bit of skin slough-off. I panicked, took her into the bathroom and called for Amber, who also panicked and told me to take her to the ER. She would join us as soon as she could get someone to watch the other girls. Bella's chest and arm already looked very red and angry.

The drive to the ER was no fun; Bella was crying in the back in her rear-facing car seat, and I was trying my best to comfort her from what seemed like miles away in the driver's seat. I wanted to just rewind the clock by just a few minutes, that's all. Where's Superman when you need him?

When I arrived at the ER with Bella wrapped in a blanket, the nurse at the desk saw me coming and picked up the phone before I even walked in. "What's wrong with the baby?", she asked as soon as I entered the door. I explained the situation. She spoke into the phone and then said, "We'll get you right back." And they did.

The ER staff was very kind, and treated Bella -- and me, a freaked-out, frightened, first-time-parent-in-the-ER -- well. They did have trouble with her IV, and I almost passed out because of the bleeding due to a failed attempt to find a good vein, but other than that I suppose the experience was as good as an ER experience can be. Amber arrived after about 30 minutes. Having her there made me feel much better. Once Bella had received morphine and they had treated her burns, we found out that our pediatrician had ordered that we be admitted to hospital. Bella had recieved 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 20%-25% of her body, so the doctor wanted to be sure she was hydrated and in a sterile environment for the next couple of days.

We left the ER -- which was at another hopsital -- and drove to the other hospital in town. We got settled into a room and the staff got another IV going. We spent the rest of that day and the night taking turns holding Bella. She would not be put down, and she couldn't sleep for more than 5 or 10 minutes. The first 24 hours after a burn are the most painful, so we kept the morphine going, but it seemed to make her irritable and itchy. The next morning, we decided to stop the morphine, and she finally slept. So did we.

While we were in the hospital, family and friends held down the home front and took great care of Aleah and Clara. When we arrived home the girls enjoyed a little family reunion; it was the first time the girls had been apart since they came home from the NICU.

For a couple of weeks after the incident, Bella required daily debridement (removal of dead tissue from her wounds) at the hospital. Once we were dismissed from the physical therapist, we continued the debridement and dressing change at home for several more weeks. Bella still has a scar on her arm, but her chest looks perfectly normal.

Despite kind and encouraging words from family and friends, I struggled for a while with blaming myself. And the truth is, I did make some mistakes. I could've done things differently and avoided the whole mess. I also know that it could've been much worse; that this burn is a relatively small event in the life of the world and it is certainly no tragedy. But this is how I've come to terms with this small-big thing and my part in causing it to happen: I did make mistakes, but mistakes only mean that I'm human; they do not mean that I don't love my children. I will always be human, and I will always make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes will cause others pain, even people I love dearly. My goal is to learn what I can from mistakes and continue the job of loving and caring for the people in my life who need that from me.

Needless to say, we no longer enjoy the health benefits of green tea, but we are certainly satisfied with our moderately-warm cups of Community Coffee Dark Roast every morning. And we keep the cups up high.

Welcome to the new (and possibly improved) Burns Family blog! For those of you who've followed our blog in the past, you can expect more of the same, although I'm hoping to be more consistent in providing updates. Life with triplets is never boring and time to blog is rare, but I'm hoping to get around to it more often. At church this morning, K encouraged us to journal during this experience, and I've been meaning to do more writing anyway, hence...I'm reviving the blog. Hope you can join me on the journey for a while.

The girls have recently celebrated their first birthday on Feb 22. For our special event that day, we went to J's photography studio to have birthday pictures taken. We gave each their own 'smash' cake and J captured some great photos as they dug in. Messy, but fun!

The next weekend, we invited friends and family to celebrate their first birthday with us. We especially wanted to say thanks to the many folks who have helped us survive the first year. The party seemed to go well, and the girls had a good time (although they had a few "moments"). Amber did a great job organizing and decorating for the party (thanks to R & J for your help), and I had fun pulling the videos and photos from the first year into a 6-minute retrospective video, which we screened at the party. Check out the photos, courtesy of J and Dad.

Coming next time...our first trip to the ER.

drb