Posted on: Sunday, August 15, 2004
Parents invent ways of caring for multiple kids
By Stephanie V. SiekAssociated Press
ST. LOUIS — It wasn't long after Joel Pekay's triplets came home from the hospital that he realized the average store's baby section didn't understand the needs of multiple-birth parents.
Associated Press In the Pekays' case, Joel Pekay and his wife were sharing caretaking duties with grandparents and a nursing staff. However, that left them without a way of knowing which baby's needs had been taken care of, and at what time. By the time the triplets were 3 weeks old, Joel Pekay had developed Baby Log, a spiral-bound checklist, which he then decided to sell to other parents, via the Internet and a Web site, www.tripletpress.com. "When there are people helping out, you don't always know what's going on. You're at work, you come home, and you don't know (things like) how much did Alec eat, how much did Shayna eat, did they eat enough, do they need a Tylenol," Pekay said.
Also catering to the needs of parents with more than one child is More Than One Inc., a company started in 1995 by Angela Pacey and her husband. It offers nearly 300 products. Pacey said the business has grown exponentially, and now earns more than $1 million in sales each year through its catalog and Web site, www.morethanone.com. The Web site offers products such as strollers for triplets, quads or quints; toddler tables that can seat up to eight children and dividers that allow more than one baby to sleep in a single crib.
The company recently expanded into manufacturing by purchasing a company that made the Anna Nursing Pillow, which allows mothers to breastfeed two babies at once. That product was invented by a mother of twins.
Yet, many of the products More Than One offers for parents of multiples were not invented by parents, but by relatives watching the parents struggle to keep up.
Kevin McNicholas recalls what it was like to be the father of newborn quadruplets 17 years ago — without such gadgets. Trying to restrain four infants long enough to feed them, for example, required strategy.
"We had these things called Sassy seats — they'd clip onto the table. But you had to be careful. You couldn't put them all on one side or the table would tip," McNicholas said.
In 2002, some 125,134 babies born in the United States were twins, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. In the same year, there were 7,401 babies born as part of a set of triplets, quadruplets, or other multiple-births. That's a slight decrease from 1998, when the number of higher-order multiple births peaked at 7,625, fueled in part by fertility drugs and treatments.
Tamatha Hicks felt like the mother of triplets after having to care for her own newborn son as well as twin nieces born six weeks earlier.
"I was trying to breastfeed my son at the same time I was trying to feed the twins. It was really hard to feed on the same schedule," Hicks said.
Her solution was the Bottle Bundle — a U-shaped pillow with an elastic loop that can hold a baby bottle for hands-free feeding. She and her sister-in-law — the mother of the twins — developed it.
Hicks now owns and manages Little Wonders, which sells about 10,000 Bottle Bundles a year, mostly to parents of multiples. She runs the business out of her home in New Jersey and is struggling to keep up with demand.
Twins, triplets, quadruplets and even larger multiple births present huge challenges to parents who are trying to take care of several children at once, because products designed for single babies are often of little help. But some of these parents find an opportunity as they try to cope — like Pekay, they end up inventing products to help make child care easier, and that other multiple-birth parents are eager to buy.
Colleen Marie Thompson and her kids Haley, left, Katie and Brenna practiced tying shoes before a recent Parents Olympics event at the Triplet Connection Convention in St. Louis. The convention draws parents of more than 100 sets of triplets, quadruplets and other multiple births together, where they swap ideas on caring for children.
