A few weeks ago, I was leaving a school board meeting and sitting at a red light in Redwood City when I saw what looked like a triplet stroller with three little blond heads in it being pushed across the other side of the street. I went a little mental and "stalked" the mom - watching her proceed up the sidewalk as I waited to turn, figuring out where I could pull over to cut her off, figuring out what I could say that wouldn't sound super creepy.
I finally decided on, "I'm sure you get comments all the time, but I have triplets just about the same age as your kids." I was pleased to find that the mom (Lucy) didn't think I was super creepy and was actually excited to meet another triplet mom. She'd recently moved from further down in the South Bay and was getting to know the local area. Her triplet girls are about 10 months older than the Teenies (but only slightly larger) and are identical. She dresses them idenitcally and they all have "L" names - in fact, the whole family does, including her husband and her older daughter, whom she homeschools. She doesn't get out with the peninsula mothers' group because she doesn't drive and as such has to keep the kids close to home.
When she invited me to meet her at the Academy of Sciences last weekend, I was a little embarrassed that I would be bringing my brother with me - we don't use a triple stroller, so I need him to push either the single or the double, not to mention the extra set of hands to run after them all. I wasn't sure if Lucy's husband was coming, so I was prepared to show up with an helper for my three as she was handling all four of hers alone. When I explained it all to Uncle Kelly, he put it plainly by asking, "So, she's just a totally different kind of mom than you are, isn't she?"
And that's true. She is. And her kids are entirely different kids than mine. You really can't compare parenting styles - so much of it depends on personalities, both yours and your kids'. Sure, her kids may be mellower than mine because she's raised them to be calm, but at not-quite-3, I'm betting it's just in their nature to be mellow where it's in my kids' nature to run.
We went in early with her, during "members' hours", which meant we could ditch the strollers and let the kids run around because there were only 100 or so people in the whole museum. We started in the aquarium, and the kids were in heaven. There are whole glass walls of fish and the boys could have stood in front of them for hours, it seemed, while Caroline bounced from one to the next yelling "Mommy, LOOK! Ooh, Uncle!"
There was a penguin feeding scheduled for 10:30 and Lucy's family wanted to see it, so we migrated up from the aquarium to the African hall. This has always been a little weird to me. The African hall is a collection of about 12 taxidermied dioramas, capped at the end by a display of live African penguins. There is some sort of disconnect there that always throws me off.
Our kids were not interested in sitting still for the penguin feeding. They were interested in checking out the dioramas and pressing the buttons on all the interactive educational screens to "learn" about migration patterns and food scarcity.
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| Caroline was especially taken with the lions. |
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| She turned around and roared at us, without even being prompted. |
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| Demon Daniel! |
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| Caroline's on a "virtual safari" |
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| Daniel is stalking his prey in the middle of the hall |
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| Max and Caroline check out the baboons. |
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| The kids know these from the zoo and made appropriate noises. |
We finally let them out into the next gallery area instead of forcing them to stay still and wait for the penguins. Max explored the land of lemurs and Daniel took a moment to rearrange the furniture, but most of this time was spent pressing the buttons on the "finch exhibit". I am not a fan of birds and admit that I did not pay attention at all the many, many times they pressed the buttons and made the explanations play, except to note charming sentences like, "Tree finches are finches who live in trees." Um. Thanks, Mr. Automated Bird Answer Guy. I think I knew THAT much.
While we were in this area, we saw more and more families filing through and I noticed at least four sets of twins - some in matching outfits and others in individual clothing. When we reunited with Lucy's family and moved on to the craft area ("make your own fish magnet!") I saw another family of twins, and when we played in the lecture hall while they made fish magnets, at least three more double strollers came through the now-open-for-everyone doors. It was definitely unofficially multiples day at the Academy!
The kids were starting to wane at this point - they'd been running non-stop and we were closing in on nap time. So we decided to head over to the rain forest and then go home. The rain forest was, along with the roof-top garden, one of the most anticipated parts of the new Academy. It's a dome that you enter at ground level and then proceed up to the ceiling on a comfortable ramp as you wind through the different levels of the rain forest, from the water on the ground to the leaf canopy, all with birds and butterflies swooping around you. It is warm and humid, as you would expect it to be, but the kids were enchanted by the butterflies - enough so that Lucy's 7 year old reminded me that, "we're not allowed to touch them, you know." At the top you get on an elevator that takes you back down to the aquarium in the basement, where we found our strollers hidden behind all the others that had come in after us, packed up, and headed home.
But not before we stopped to see our picture. As you wait to enter the rain forest, they line you up in front of a green screen to pose for a picture. Lucy's husband commented that they've never gotten a picture where all four kids were looking the same direction. When we stopped by the members' desk to look at them, we saw that the four girls had finally all found the camera.
Then we saw OUR picture.
Seriously, I bought it just so that the print wouldn't be floating around in the museum to scare the other children.
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