There is no way I’m going to be able to have these babies vaginally. This is fairly depressing for me, because I was so looking forward to a natural home birth. There’s only one doctor in town that will even consider doing triplets vaginally, and everybody else thinks he’s a little nuts. When you think about it, there are three babies, which makes three possible breeches, three cords for three babies to get tangled in/strangled on/prolapsed, plus they will probably be quite premature and the stress of a vaginal birth could kill them. So I’m having a c-section, no possible question and no way out. That’s a big reason I’m thinking about having more kids after this, see if I can try for a singleton; I was really looking forward to childbirth, and now I’m going to miss it.
Another interesting fact I picked up from reading about twin births, is that (a) the total time from onset of labor to the birth of the second baby is usually shorter than in single births, and (b) the second baby pretty much just pops out, barring a mispresentation (i.e., breech or shoulder), which is common. After all, the first baby already did the hard part of stretching mom out of shape, so there’s not much to hold the second one back.
But as I said, hardly anybody has triplets that way; most of us won’t even consider it (even me, and I was the most hard-line home-birth no-drugs preacher around!).
I have made a rather unfortunate discovery this year. I appear to be lactose-intolerant. This isn’t good, considering I should be drinking five or six cups of milk a day with this pregnancy. I still drink my milk, and take a LactAid pill with each glass. It helps a little, but I’m still very uncomfortable much of the time. I guess I’m starting to get used to it, but this is definitely not fun.