SPOT THE DIFFERENCE!
Think that your brood’s a handful? Meet the triplets whose parents have to colour code their toes to tell them apart
EVERY other day, 33-year-old Karen Gilbert sets up a nail bar in her kitchen in Pontypool, South Wales. She lays out three pots of Rimmel 60 Seconds nail varnish in a row — fuchsia, mint green and purple — summons her ever-helpful assistant Faye, aged four, and the two of them make a start. One by one, Faye holds three sets of pink wriggling toes and coos into three chubby, smiling faces, while Karen very carefully paints three sets of teeny toenails three different colours and gives them a quick squirt with a rapid-drying spray.
And then everyone can relax. Because for another couple of days, Karen, 33, husband Ian, 35, and Faye can tell apart the one-year-old identical triplets Ffion (fuchsia), Maddison (mint green) and Paige (purple), if only by their nail colour.
‘They’re identical, even to us,’ says Karen. ‘We’ve never been able to tell them apart.’
‘I sometimes get inklings about which is which,’ says Ian. ‘But I’m not always right.’
They’ve tried everything. First, it was hospital bracelets on their hands and feet, replaced every few weeks as they became tighter.
‘Until somehow they started falling off,’ says Ian. ‘We found two on the mattress of the cot they all shared. We knew they couldn’t have swapped over because they couldn’t move, but it still made us wonder. Your mind starts playing tricks. Perhaps Ffion was now Paige!’
Next (after checking with their doctor it wouldn’t do any harm), they used a marker pen to scribble initials on the soles of their feet.
‘But it started rubbing off in the hot weather, so that was no good,’ says Karen. ‘A couple of times we came close to a mix-up.’
‘Then Karen had a brainwave — one day I came home and she was doing all their nails,’ says Ian. ‘And it’s just stuck.’
The triplets are the same size and weight, with cheeky brown eyes, squishy pink skin and a scattering of auburn hair.
ThEY don’t have any birthmarks, squints, crooked smiles, cuts, grazes, cradle cap, spots, eczema, blotchy cheeks. They’re just perfect.
And right now, in their matching pink romper suits, t hey are extremely active: playing with the remote control, wallowing in their inflatable ball pit or making a dash for the kitchen.
‘It’s like a game show,’ says Ian. ‘They see an open door and they’re off. You grab one and bring her back and another one’s off to the stairs. It’s like herding cats. And unless we check their toes, we never know which is which.’
‘Is t hat Ffion on t he l eft?’ asks Karen.
‘I don’t know. Oh no, mint green — it’s Maddison!’
It’s enough to drive you mad. And exhausted and broke.
Babies are wonderful, but they are also a never-ending cycle of feeding, winding, changing, feeding, winding, changing, on and on. Each week, this lot get through 168 nappies (the council has provided an extra full- sized nappy bin), 84 bottles of formula and ten packets of wet wipes.
The washing machine needs loading and emptying three times a day, the dishwasher twice. The girls’ matching white Ikea high chairs are wiped down four times a day.
Thanks to IVF, where doctors routinely place more than one embryo in the womb to maximise the chance of a pregnancy, multiple births are increasingly common.
But Karen and Ian’s girls were natural — conceived from one egg, at odds of 160,000 to one.
‘We weren’t sure about having a second after Faye. I’m an only child, so I’d have been happy with just one,’ says Ian.
‘But then we thought it would be nice to have a brother or sister for Faye to play with.’
When Karen became pregnant in January 2013, she had an inkling that something was different.
‘I had much worse morning sickness than with Faye, so I assumed it was a boy. And I was massive — I just kept growing and growing.’
And then, at eight weeks, she suffered cramps and bleeding and thought it was all over.
At the hospital, the sonographer um-ed and ah-ed and made lots of funny sounds before eventually saying: ‘I’m sorry, I need a second opinion — I think it’s three.’
‘Three!’ splutters Ian, still in shock nearly two years later. ‘I still can’t believe it. The top half of my head went cold. Three!’
‘ I just felt really, really sick,’ says Karen. ‘I thought she was joking, but she said they weren’t allowed to joke.
‘Three was a complete gamechanger. But at least it wasn’t four. We were laughing and crying — just hysterical.’ The pregnancy was far from routine. Karen’s bump grew so quickly her balance went and she kept toppling over. her liver was squashed, her lungs compressed and she struggled to breathe.
She fell down their (very steep) stairs twice, was in a wheelchair for most of the second half of the pregnancy and was admitted to hospital more than eight times.
‘Every time, we thought: “That’s it!” ’ says Ian. They were constantly worried about losing one or more of the babies. They were t wice off ered a termination.
‘They couldn’t do what’s called a selective reduction because they were in the same sac [of amniotic fluid], so it was all or none,’ says Karen. ‘We couldn’t even consider it.’
On August 2, 2013, Ffion, Maddison and Paige were brought into the world by emergency caesarean.
They were two months early, weighed 3lb 8oz, 3lb 5oz and 3lb 4oz respectively and spent four weeks in the neonatal unit at Royal Gwent hospital in Newport.
Today, you’d never know. They are bright, alert, constantly grinning, giggling and gabbling and whizzing about the front room like little pink puppies.
But an even bigger miracle is that Karen and Ian are utterly calm, smiley, happy and somehow, despite what must have been a sleepdeprived year, haven’t killed each other yet.
For the first three months, the babies were fed every four hours. Every feed took an hour-and-a-half, which left two-and-a-half hours for a snooze before the next one. ‘The 2am feed didn’t bother me too much. After a week or so, you get used to i t,’ says Ian.
‘ But the noise! They all slept in one cot at the end of our bed. It was like a farmyard.’
To make sure no one was fed twice, they were carefully kept in formation — Ffion on the left, Maddison in the middle, Paige on the right.
They were in this order whether they were in their highchairs, the bath, their pram or their cot — Ffion, Maddison and Paige, left to right, a bit like Ant and Dec — so Karen and Ian could tell at a glance which was which.
But now the triplets are on the move, this approach is a distant memory. The only way of telling them apart is to watch them for a while. Paige is the naughtiest (‘the ringleader who’ll be the most trouble as a teenager’), Maddison i s the cheekiest and Ffion is the calmest.
When the triplets were born, Ian and Karen went into ‘emergency shutdown’, allocating each other tasks. But soon they had developed an instinctive teamwork.
‘We just know, without a look or a glance. It’s like a sixth sense — pass the wipes, quick!’ says Ian.
‘It’s definitely brought us closer. We don’t have time to bicker or row. We just get on with it.’
The secret to their sanity is routine and order. ‘Ian is a bit OCD so that helps,’ says Karen.
By four months the girls were sleeping through the night. Today, they (and Faye) go to bed at 7pm and wake at 7am, on the dot. They
are the happiest babies I’ve ever seen, t he house is immaculate and Faye clearly adores them — cuddling them, kissing them, fussing over them and showing no sign of jealousy.
‘She’s very proprietorial and protective over them,’ says Karen. ‘I was quite worried about her, because I was three when my sister was born and I hated her, but Faye’s been completely brilliant.’
It probably helps that the triplets don’t grizzle, whine, fret, moan or screech.
But EVEN s o, going out is a military operation. Popping out to the shops is simply out of the question.
‘We’re getting really good at it — we can get out in an hour if we’re organised,’ says Ian, with no trace of irony.
Once out ( i n their £ 500 triplet pram, courtesy of eBay), it’s mayhem. While triplets cause a stir at the best of times, these three bring entire streets to a standstill.
‘At f i rst i t shocked and scared me,’ says Ian. ‘It was so overwhelming. We’d get mobbed. It was like being a pop star, but worse.
‘People didn’t just point, they wanted to touch them. And some of their comments!’ ‘One woman came right up to me in tesco and shouted: “Did you have them vaginally?” ’ says Karen.
‘Blokes would slap me on the back and say: “Your worst nightmare’s come true. It’s over, mate!” ’ says Ian.
‘I don’t think they mean it. I think they just see them and panic-talk. Once in M&S they nearly had to call security because everyone was blocki ng the aisle. Sometimes when you just need to get to the bank, it’s difficult.’
Money is a huge worry. Ian earns £ 18,000 a year as company director of an amusement machine repair company. Karen has j ust handed in her notice as an office administrator. ‘ We would never be able to afford the childcare.’
they’ve outgrown their car, are f ast outgrowing their three-bedroom terrace house — ‘ We need a garden and some storage and I’ve always wanted a shed’ — and nights out and holidays are a distant memory.
Only due to canny bargainhunting and the kindness of friends and strangers are they somehow making ends meet.
‘We tend not to think too much about t he f uture because when we get to crunch points, we just cope with it. We always have.’
However, they have put the girls to work — as TV actresses. the brilliant thing about identical siblings is that they can all play the same baby on screen. When one gets tired, the next is rotated in to avoid filming delays.
So far, they’ve appeared on Casualty and have 18 days in the pipeline with Ruth Jones on Stella.
‘We can’t afford to put any money aside for them, as we did for Faye, but this way they’ve all got their own bank accounts,’ says Ian.
But what about the prospect of four teenage daughters?
He goes rather pale. ‘We’ll need a room just for shoes. More t han anything I’m dreading all the shoes.’ And weddings? ‘I think we’ll have to talk them out of getting married — or else they will have to share the same wedding day, just as they’ve shared everything else,’ says Karen.
h OWEVER calm, organised and efficient you are, life with three crawling triplets and a four-year- old can’t always be easy.
‘It’s a production line. I clock on at 7am and clock off at 7pm. I used to get a bit teary and quite jealous when Ian went to work, but now mostly we just laugh,’ says Karen. ‘If you think of it as a chore, it becomes one. And they’re brilliant fun — just look at them.’
She keeps sane with weekly bingo nights, a l ot of TV, pyjamas and ice cream, and very occasionally pretending to Ian she’s asleep when one of the girls cries in the night.
‘We’ve survived our first year and everyone says that’s the hardest. But if money were no object, I’d love an au pair.’
Finally, the million dollar question — are they planning on extending their family?
‘If money wasn’t a problem, we’d try for a boy,’ says Ian, surrounded by pink. ‘But we’ve been told it’s a 30 to 35 per cent chance of multiples again and that’s a big scare factor.’ And if that happened? ‘We’d cope, because we’re used to it,’ says Karen. ‘I don’t feel as if I’m finished — I feel I could keep going.’
Suddenly, Ian sounds panicky: ‘Hang on, Karen — we’ve changed so many nappies I think we’ve done our fill.’
As we speak, one of the girls makes a crawling sprint for the door. Is it Maddison? Or Paige? Or maybe it’s Ffion? ‘I think it’s Ffion,’ says Ian. ‘ No, i t’s Maddison,’ says Karen. ‘I can tell by the way she’s crawling.’
Just as she reaches the hallway, we see a flash of purple nail varnish. It’s Paige. Wrong again.