Wildernest FAQ'S

Since we get a lot of similar questions, I thought doing a little FAQ for this “intro series” would be a great addition. So let’s get started!

1. What do you guys do for a living?
I have a BAS in Graphic Design and I am a full-time web developer/designer for a major local media company that I love. I worked from home 3 days a week prior to COVID, but have been 100% remote since March with no plans on returning to the office for a while. My husband, Jay, is a licensed contractor who co-owns his own framing and custom carpentry company with his life-long best friend. He builds houses (he built ours), does interior finish work, and just about anything I can dream of.

2. Where are you located?
We are in Acushnet, MA!

3. Can we get a house tour? Why do you have so much open space?
Soon! We built this house last year and moved in January of 2020 knowing it wasn't 100% finished OR furnished. To save money, Jay finishes up bits and pieces of the house whenever he can. Some big projects coming down the pipeline include finishing our entire front porch, baseboard on the second floor, finishing a huge second floor playroom, and more.

We moved from a 500sqft house we lived in for almost 8 years to this 2700sqft house, and had essentially no furniture to move in with us. Because of the babies, we decided to hold off on purchasing almost everything on the main floor until they're, at the very least, out of the extra disgusting toddler stage. What looks like a lot of empty, wasted space definitely has a purpose, just not for a few years 😂

Over the last year I have been slowly working on a few rooms that I'm super close to revealing (via Instagram and blog), and will for sure have a full house tour up on our YouTube once everything is done.

4. Are the triplets IVF?
No, they were spontaneous, which means we got pregnant without taking any sort of fertility drug or doing IVF.

5. Did you want to be a SAHM?
Absoluetely not! While I totally think being a SAHM is one of the hardest jobs out there, I could never see myself ever meeting my creative and goal driven needs in this role. I NEED my job to stay sane and feel full-filled.

6. How do you work, take care of triplets, and do IG?
Thanks to my amazing mom (aka Grammy), I do not do it alone! She does almost all of their care while I work during the week - I will take breaks as needed to help with meals, snack, nap, getting them in and out, etc, but it's all her otherwise. On top of that, she often helps with cloth diaper stuffing, laundry, and is a neat freak like me (it's who I get it from 😂).

As far as managing Instagram, it’s not anything that ever feels forced, so I utilize a lot of my spare time doing it since I enjoy it. When the babies are napping, during breaks at work, once the babies are down for the night, etc. If I’m not in the mood to write, I don’t feel the need to post (which is why my feed isn’t always active daily). I’m the type of person that thrives on keeping busy.

7. Did you sleep train?
The short answer to this is: not exactly. I don’t feel like we ever had to formally sleep train. Instead, we started with good, safe sleep habits from the day we brought the home from the NICU and remained super consistent. We eliminated as many “sleep crutches” as we could, got them into a little routine, and stuck with it like our life depended on it (because it did 😂).

I go much more into depth on what exactly we did (or didn’t do) in this post here: https://www.thewildernest.net/home/category/sleep-routines?rq=sleep

The only time I ever felt like I was using some sort of sleep training method (and I’d call it modified Ferber) was when Wilder was transitioning off of night feeds. It took him a month longer than his siblings to stop eating at 2AM, and he was waking out of habit instead of hunger. I think it was a week or two of going in, giving him his paci, patting his back, leaving him (even if he was still crying), then repeating every 15 minutes or so (if needed) before this habit was broken and he was sleeping through the night (5.5 months old).

8. What do they eat on a typical day?
Every morning breakfast is a bowl of oatmeal mixed with either peanut butter or almond butter and some kind of mushed fruit. In addition to that, they’ll have whole grain Cherrios, breakfast bars, sausages, eggs, and/or pancakes. Not usually all of those, maybe 2 or 3 along with the oatmeal.

Snacks are a combo of: edamame, raisins, pepperoni, grapes, berries, cheese, beans, and some others I’m probably forgetting.

Lunch can be a crapshoot. Some staples include grilled cheese, sweet potato, greek yogurt, cottage cheese, pasta, mac and cheese, and some other random things.

For dinner I prep one meal for all 3 for an entire week. You can check out the tag #WildernestMealPrep for ideas on what I make!

9. Do you have a cooking/cleaning schedule?
I am very much a “tidy as I go” kind of person. I pick up all throughout the day because I think it helps keeps things manageable and not as overwhelming. I’d also consider myself to be a slight minimalist, which means we don’t have a lot of clutter or stuff that needs to be picked up or cleaned! Toy are a big one here, we have one small basket and my mantra is “if it overflow, its goes.” Keeping things where they belong is the most helpful - it’s amazing how “clean” your house actually feels when everything is in its place.

While keeping organized/tidy is an every day thing, I do a once a week deep clean (scrubbing bathrooms, full vacuum/mop, general disinfecting, etc) on Fridays. Hack: I clean my shower WHILE I shower.

Aside from the Sunday meal prep for the triplets’ dinners and making random things throughout the week for their lunch/snack/breakfast, cooking is what I avoid for now. I barely eat and my husband just kinda fends for himself 😂I know I will most likely have to cook daily when the babies turn into children, so for now I’m enjoying not doing so while it lasts!

10. Did we change anything about our house once we found out we were having triplets?
We didn’t, but technically didn’t have the choice since all the plans were already done and approved prior to finding out we were even pregnant. Thanks to my amazing ability to overthink just about everything, we planned the upstairs to have a master bedroom/bathroom, laundry room, TWO kids bedrooms with a jack/jill bath in case I ever changed my mind about having an only child, and then an additional large playroom.

When we found out there were three, we went back and fourth on splitting the playroom into a third room, but decided the playroom would eventually save our sanity. The boys would most likely have no problems sharing a room while young, and we had the option of converting the playroom into a bedroom when they outgrew it and maybe didn’t want to share a room.

If your question wasn’t answered, stayed tuned on Instastories! I’ll be answering some of the questions I got and also do some video answers.