Owen, Noah (Vomit Action Shot) and Bella on Halloween

Okay, just realizing that it's been nearly two months since I've done an update on the babies, which makes me derelict in my blogging duties, but I assure you we've been busy around here.

Mr. Noah came home from the hospital on the god awful formula that smelled like fermenting potatoes (I suspect it also tasted like fermenting potatoes) and we went thru several weeks of hell where he crapped six times daily and he wasn't all together happy about the process.  While being regular is good for one's mood, there is certainly a case of taking it too far.

He also wasn't putting any weight on with that junk and the three hour feeds were making us miserable.   So we were happy a few weeks back when they finally put him on the same formula as his brother.  Within a week, he was doing so much better, and was really putting on weight.  Were it not for his unusually large cranium, his body would all but be caught up in size.  He is absolutely adorable and I love him even when he's screaming bloody murder at 2am every night and waking up the other kids (yes, really, every night).

Noah and Bella, Appetizers before Dinner

It's really amazing, Noah can fit both his hands in his mouth.  Bella tries to but Noah really has a big mouth.

Ms. Bella is our little star, and with that, sometimes the primadonna.  She amazes me everyday with her vocalizations already.  You can really see that she is trying to learn to talk by watching mom and dad (Note to self, now is the time for me to strike the "F" word from my vocabulary).  Her body strength is amazing too, and she was the first to coordinate both of her hands to grab at toys above her head.  She seems to be hitting every development milestone a little faster than the boys.

She has absolutely the most beautiful smile when you play with her.  Unfortunately, every time we try to take a picture she puts on her best Mona Lisa smile.  Of course, she can crank with the best of them too and it seems that mom is the only one who can regularly get her to calm down.  Nobody said it would be easy.

Bella at Tummy Time

The picture of Bella above is actually a couple of weeks old, and she now regularly raises her head when on her tummy.  The boys aren't quite there with this yet.

I'll end with a short note on Mr. Owen.  He's now the biggest of the babies and is really growing so well.  We were finally permitted to take him off his heart rate monitor last week, so that was a tremendous milestone for us.  One picture of him below, and that's it for this week's update.

Owen - Ummm...I didn't dress him

I just launched a new blog that is more focused on life simplification principals over at You, Simplified.   The scope of things here at Scribe for the Tribe was a bit too broad.  I'll still update this site on a semi-regular basis with updates on the babies but most of my other self-interest articles will go on the new blog. 

I've been spending my free cycles over the last four weeks working on writing my first eBook online.  It was meant as a means to put together a few great ideas on Life Simplification and then offer to would-be subscribers here and at You, Simplified, but since I can't seem to find a clean way to offer it up via Feedburner, and I'm loathe to try a new-to-me service like AWeber, I've just linked it off the new, simple, Downloads page on the main You, Simplified site.  Please check it out and sign up for email alerts for when new articles are published.

The Book is called, aptly, "You, Simplified – Handbook for a Simpler Life."

It's a free eBook, running at 11,000 words and 53 pages.  I cover five main topics in the book as follows:

1.  Life Design 101 – Learn how to create a clear picture of the life you want, the life you were meant to live.  Then engage in the steps necessary to clear your current life of distractions to let your new life in.

2.  Simplify Your Stuff – Do not have anything around your home that is not either beautiful or extremely useful.  You'll learn some techniques to clean up your home.

3.  Simplify Your Commitments – Everyone has 24 hours in a day.  How you spend them determines whether you will reach your goals or not.

4.  Simplify Your Health – It can be hard to fit in regular exercise, but it really takes surprisingly little to get you into functional shape.

5.  Simplify Your Finances – Most people stay in the rut that they are in because they need the money.  Structure your finances in a way that will allow you to pursue your passions.

Last, but certainly not least, I've had the good fortune of having an article published today over at a terrific blog called Balance in Me.  Please show some link love and head over there to check it out, "6 Life-Changing Lessons Learned in 6 Months of Raising 3 Babies."

I promise a baby update by this Wednesday.  Thanks for reading and take care.

- Papa Charley

I've come across alot of very inspiring articles this week that I thought might be helpful to those of you who may be unhappy with your job or current circumstances.  I think all of us have something we'd like to improve in our life, or maybe even some dreams that we may have forgotten, that we deserve to re-kindle. 

My new friend, Arvind, has a great new post out this week with some inspirational advice about approaching every day as if it were a carnival.  This is authentic living, with optimism and staying away from folks that will keep you down.  8 Simple Tips to Have a Carnival in Your Everyday Life.

I love this next article.  Particularly the part about how children don't over analyze their life choices.  If they want to do something, they just go out and do it.   Us adults, we analyze all the really bad things that could happen and then judge whether the thing we want to do is really worth it in light of that.  Sometimes, we talk ourselves out of a totally awesome, life-changing experience  Moving to Paris Without Quitting My Day Job – A Lesson in Becoming a Non-Conformist.

From the above guest article, I linked over to the author's blog and found a really great audio interview with Author Pam Slim, who's book, Escape from Cubicle Nation I am six chapters into and thoroughly enjoying.  Pam talks about going after her own dreams and how she escaped her own cubicle-hell.  How Best-Selling Author Pam Slim Started Her Blog to Balance Her Life and Dreams.

Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love writer, Jonathan Fields has a terrific inspirational article from earlier this week about the lessons learned while surfing and observing other surfers out on the open waters.  The Surfer's Guide to Entrepreneurial Bliss.

I'm new to the Dumb Little Man blog.  I guess that's like saying I'm new to sliced bread, but hey, better late than never, right?  The Art of Changing Easily and Gracefully is a terrific article about focusing on the change you want, and not on the results you don't want.  The scary but exciting truth is that the World seems to change faster and faster, and the true successes are those who can adapt quickly and not get all flustered when the rug gets pulled out from underneath you.

Jeffrey Tang also wrote a great article this week on entrepreneurship and the approach one needs to take to develop the proper mindset.  When I write, I try to always ask myself, what can I do to be most helpful to my readers.  Jeffrey takes it a step further by teaching us to take a bolder approach.  The Number One Question Entrepreneurs Forget to Ask.

For the US readers, enjoy your Labor Day weekend.  I'll be returning with more articles on Monday.

Each Thursday, for the near future, I give updates on how our baby triplets are doing in the hospital.  They were born May 28th at 27 weeks gestational age.  Bella Marie born 1lb 14oz, Owen Charles born 1lb 14oz, and Noah Anthony born 2lb 4oz.

I had to take a look back at the previous editions to get my bearings for this post.  Sometimes I lose track of what I've been talking about.  Oft times, the days run a bit together.  Work, eat, hospital, write, sleep.  Work, eat, hospital, write, sleep. 

Bella Sends Her Love

Bella Marie – Winning the Race

I've enjoyed my time with Bella over the last week.  I've gotten some peaceful time to feed her.  It seems she's most awake at the 8:30am and 8:30pm feeds, not so much in the middle of the day.  My God, last night, she was so wide awake.  It's tremendous because she's very happy and interactive.  It's difficult in that she's just starting her wiggle-worm stage and I'm trying to learn how to change a diaper around wiggles and a litany of wires and tubes. 

She finished her whole bottle for me last night and I like to sit there and think about how her senses and her brain are starting to process everything going on around her.  She's the only one we've been able to get a weight on, recently, because the boys have been hooked up to the ventilators.  She's up to 5lbs 4oz now. 

Noah and his Guard Dog

Noah Anthony – Surgery

Noah had his surgery Saturday morning.  The Pyloric Stenosis surgery is one of the surgeries that Owen had the week prior.  It's supposed to be only like a five or ten minute surgery (not including setup) and is quite minor.  They just cut the muscle around the Pyloric valve that sits between the stomach and the intestines, so that food can travel through.  The muscle can sometimes prevent this flow in preemies. 

Well, two hours in, I was freaking out inside, trying not to let my wife see it.  The surgery was actually taking longer than both of Owen's put together. 

When the surgeon came up, she told me that there were complications, that his stomach lining tore during the surgery.  They then had to go in from a different angle and sew up the lining.  To look at him, now, he has four incisions in his belly.  I'm sure he and his brother will be comparing battle scars for years to come.

We had an X-Ray today on the area of his stomach lining that had to be repaired and unofficially, it looked good, meaning that nothing was leaking into the surround area from the stomach wound.  So that's good, and he's resting as well as he can. 

He's picked up a bug from his ventilator tube as well and is being treated today with antibiotics.  He's puffy from the fluids so they have to give him diuretics to counteract that.  This worries me because he had a helluva time dropping the excess fluid before.

Other than that, he's doing just great (sarcasm mode)!

Owen Detoxing

Owen Charles – On the Mend

So, Owen's surgery was now a couple of weeks ago.  They had previously tried to take him off his ventilator, and the poor guy crashed hard.  Turns out that he had a lot of fluid-retention and that was building up around the lungs, making it very difficult to breathe.

They gave him four doses of steroids (I think this kid's gonna have 'roid rage by the time he's two….remember, you read it here first) to help with his lungs and then took him off the ventilator a few hours ago.  So, here's hoping this time it worked.  I think he is also now done with his antibiotics because he, too, had caught a resilient bug from his ventilator tube. 

I guess he's on methadone now, to help him with withdrawal symptoms since they are trying to ween him off the painkillers.  I say it again and again, but tough way to start.

The important part is that they've started feeding him small amounts of milk every hour, and his intestines are working, which is great news since they hadn't been sewn together for ten weeks.  So, this is a terrific success (no sarcasm mode). 

Yours Truly and Wife at Baby Shower

Work had a nice baby shower for us on Tuesday.  We got a number of nice things to help round out our needs…another pack n play, a baby einstein play center, some boys clothes and a bunch of cool toys.  It was touching to see everyone who had chipped in and showed up to share the occasion.

That's it for this week.  Thanks so much for everyone's kind thoughts.  

- Namaste

Papa Charley

Inspired by the concept of the Bible’s Ten Commandments and my earlier Great Expectations Manifesto for my children, I thought that I would spend some time in meditation and come up with my own commandments list.  With complete reverence to the Bible version, I put together eleven sacred principles that I hope will guide my actions in my life.

I think this is a great process for anyone to go through for themselves and you may find, as I have, that some of them change over time.  Also, I don’t mean the list to be comprehensive, but they are definitely solid principles to live by.

 Charley’s Eleven Commandments

1. We are all One
2. Live simply so that others may simply live
3. Learn the lesson, then let go of the past
4. Action, not reaction
5. Slow and steady wins the race
6. Deeds, not Words
7. Embrace your Emotions
8. Be Love and Creativity
9. Foundations are the key to Strength
10. Those who persevere are rewarded
11. Share your gifts with the World

What would your commandments list look like?

Photo by wcm1111

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/drp/

I remember reading back in High School The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.  In fact, I read this one summer after seeing my cousin Matt from Oregon bring it up for some light reading on a visit with us. 

I have forgotten more of this great book than I remember but I do recall quite vividly the first insight that has made a lasting impact on my life:  Pay attention to the coincidences in your life.  I am paraphrasing, but that is the essence of the first prophecy from that book.  As a side note, I pulled the book out of storage today to give it another go around.  As Henry Drummond is quoted as saying, "When you read a book through the second time, you don't see something in it you didn't see before, you see something in yourself that wasn't there before.”  Redfield's book was one of those life-changing moments for me.  It taught me that there were other roads to spirituality apart from Catholicism which I have personally perceived to be occasionally oppressive in practice. 

Okay, lost a little focus there, but stay with me, it comes together. 

So with a second cup of coffee, let's bridge the gap and get back to "Enthusiasm." 

I am reading another great book right now, by Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage (Plus).  Paulo is my favorite author, by the way, bar none.  His writing is beautiful, poetic and exemplifies the essence of spirituality.

I came across a passage that particularly struck me, that forced me to put down the book and meditate on the message given.  Just prior to the halfway mark of the book, the narrator, who is on the Road to Santiago to metaphorically find himself, illustrates a lesson with his guide on the concept of Agape, which is love powered by enthusiasm.  As children, we are absolutely fascinated by everything, from what is on our dinner plates, to the bugs crawling on concrete.  We approach learning with the greatest of enthusiasm, perhaps to impress others, but more likely because this world is actually a fascinating place, warts and all. 

At some point in pre-pubescence, this diminishes, perhaps due to peer pressure or from the constant barrage of mom and dad saying “Don’t touch that!”, and by the time we are adults, on our own, with the freedom to do whatever we wish, the world no longer fascinates us.  We fall into routine that, though malleable, we become stagnant for the rest of our lives.  We learn more in the first five years of our lives than we do in the remaining seventy-odd years.  The major reason this is so, I think, is because of enthusiasm, agape, this wild-eyed wonder about our world. 

The message that Coelho is trying to get across is that we need to re-awaken that enthusiasm in us, in order to break routine, in order to start building a life worth living.  There are exercises in the book that help to awake this.  I will not spoil the book otherwise.  It is a great read and for $14, the investment is most worthwhile.

So I set the book down at this point to meditate a few minutes on the concept of enthusiasm, and what this could bring to my writing and my music.  Then I picked up the latest edition of the magazine, The Writer, and started reading an article on a nineteen year old author who published her first book when she was ten.  She said the key to her writing success was Enthusiasm. 

That's where the first Celestine Prophecy regarding coincidences comes into play.  I ripped out the article and tucked it neatly in my Paulo Coelho book and then headed into my little computer room/studio.  For the next two hours I put enthusiasm to work and came up with five distinctly different song structures that I will be busily completing over the next few days.  I dabbled in some poetry as well, in the hopes of completing my second manuscript and I even came up with a unique perspective on creative practice that I will share on Friday.  It was one of those rare moments where the Muse was speaking quite clearly to me. 

Walter Russell (see Yesterday’s post) also believed in the importance of enthusiasm for one’s work and even went so far as to state that he believed it to be the key to staying strong and vibrant as we age.

I hope to be able to capture that moment more regularly with my net of enthusiasm.  Anyway, that's all for now, it feels like it’s going to be a great day today.

Peace,

Charley