Now seven and a half years old, Doug and Dusty Feller's triplets, Davis, Kennedy, and Eli, are heading to second grade this coming school year. Cute, polite and smart, the trio were born just minutes from one another with Davis arriving first at 2 lbs. 4 ozs., Kennedy second at 1 lb. 14 ozs., and Eli completing the set at 1 lb. 10 ozs. The children spent 64, 69, and 76 days respectively in the neonatal intensive care unit before they were able to come home.
"Part of it was a blessing because the children came home on a schedule," Dusty explains. "I am still personal friends with a number of the nurses who cared for them. They taught us that if you feed one, you feed the other. If one wakes up, you wake up the other. We would change them and we would feed them and it had a conveyor belt feel. You cannot sweat the small stuff. Everyday that we survived was a blessing."
"Sometimes we feel that having three all together was easier than having three spread apart," Doug, CEO of Venice's Village On The Isle, says. "We potty trained them all at once, they learned to swim all at once. But we also tell people that we didn't taste food for three years. We just had to eat as fast as we could because there was always something going on."
The children are close friends and depend on one another.
"I swear that when they were little, they developed this language that only they understood," Doug says. "One would talk their gibberish and the other two would roll around laughing. They knew what they were saying, but we didn't have a clue."
For Doug and Dusty, the experience of having triplets only strengthened the already very strong marital bond they had.
"When we found out we were pregnant with triplets, our doctor told us, 'Promise me when you want to cry, you find the laughter in every situation,'" Dusty says. "And that's how we have handled it."
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