For six years, Leonie Fitzgerald desired to have a child. The 46-year-old Brisbane mother currently has triplets who are nine months old, and she runs her home like a military installation. The days are planned out on a whiteboard to the hour, with every feed and sleep time noted. We are really strict about their schedule, she tells Essential Baby. Although we don’t tinker with that stuff, trying to adhere to it gives you anxiety. I confess, “I adore routine but other days I just want to sit there and do nothing.”
Leonie and Pete were given the shock of their life when their first ultrasound indicated one of the two embryos implanted had split and they were expecting triplets after six years of trying for a baby and four losses. The pregnancy was difficult, and Leonie spent almost six months in bed, requiring assistance merely to get to the bathroom. A C-section was scheduled for 33 weeks, but Leonie got a gu.t feeling the day before that she should go to the hospital. She began to suffer a sei.zure and passed out a few hours later while getting a heartbeat scan.
She explained, “Pete felt I was being electrocuted.” “Something wasn’t quite right, I told my spouse. ‘Why aren’t you doing anything?’ he yelled at the nurse, and that was the last I heard.” Leonie had pre-ec.lamsia, a rare but dea.dly i.llness in which high b.lood pressure causes convu.lsions, and she was put into a drug-induced c.oma before being rushed in for an emer.gency cae.sarean. The small girls weighed between 1190g and 1940g when they were delivered at 32 weeks. Their little hands were small enough to wrap around Leonie’s tiniest fingernail.
The babies were in the hospital for seven weeks, during which Leonie and Pete claimed they attempted to learn as much as they could from the staff. They both admitted that they had no prior experience with newborns and that they were entirely unprepared. “It was bizarre since we didn’t even have their beds set up and didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing when we first got home,” she says. “We exchanged glances and said, ‘What are we meant to do now?’ I am typically quite planned in my life, but when they returned home, I had no plans. We didn’t have enough bottles to feed them, so we had to rely on the hospital’s disposable bottles. That worried me since I had no idea what I was meant to do other than feed them every four hours.”
When the infants got home, they were still little; the tiniest, Liliana, weighed just 2kg, and Leonie was afraid she’d b.reak them. Leonie was still healing from the delivery stress, so they hired a babysitter who still comes five days a week and relies on regular visitors from friends and relatives. She explained that having multiples requires them to be in a routine, and that the whiteboard facilitates this by “creating a procedure where everyone is on the same page who comes to help,” she added. They all subsist on frozen dinners, Leonie laughs, which are frequently brought over by friends and relatives.
“A buddy purchased a freezer for us and loaded it with food.” She claims that everything is purchased in quantity, and that she searches the internet for deals before rushing into stores to purchase the remaining stock. She chuckles as she says, “Everything is en masse.” “You don’t just buy one of anything when you need three.”
When I go grocery shopping for diapers, I load up the cart. I seek bargains and return with two shopping carts. I thoroughly wipe down the shelf and inform the girl at the register that I’ve cleaned the shelf and will be returning from the car to acquire more. Leonie, who is also a company owner and shares their experience on Instagram, values her time.
She even got a three-baby pram, but she wouldn’t let on that she had triplets because she didn’t want others to notice and wanted to stop and chat to her about life with triplets. When they’re not operating their companies or caring for their children, Leonie and Pete take turns driving around Brisbane and the Gold Coast collecting donated milk from compassionate mothers.
“One day, I drove three hours during a storm scooping up breast milk from all around Brisbane, and I was worried I wouldn’t make it home to see the children,” she says. She stated she was in tears by the time she got to the last residence, and her companion handed her a bottle of wine.
Pete traveled to Toowoomba on another occasion to get milk from a woman, who subsequently handed him her chest freezer. She exclaims, “These women are incredibly selfless.” “They’re incredible. Some of us are pumping only to provide milk for our daughters. It makes me feel really blessed. I have a few frequent contributors with whom I communicate once a week.”
