Three’s a (Welcome) Crowd For Local Family with Triplets

One step into Lisa and Todd Grooms' home and you’ll be greeted by a sea of baby bottles, basinetts and bouncy chairs.

Since going from one child to four in less than a year, life has gotten a whole lot busier for the Yorkville family.

In June, their son Alexander, 20 months, became big brother to his triplet siblings.

“Sleep? What is sleep?” Lisa Grooms said with a laugh. “It’s non-stop feeding babies, soothing babies, changing babies. It’s kind of like an assembly line.”

But the Grooms wouldn’t have it any other way.

After being unable to conceive after trying for two years, they turned to in vitro fertilization, and were able to get pregnant with Alexander. Wanting to expand their family, the Grooms, both 40, chose to do IVF again last year.

“We’re so lucky to have that option,” Lisa Grooms said. “If it wasn’t for that, we would not have these four beautiful children.”

She delivered the triplets, identical twin girls, Anastasia and Addison, and a boy, Aidan, in June, two and a half months premature.

Though the Grooms wanted more children, being told they were pregnant with triplets came as a shock.

“When I was pregnant, people would ask, ‘What are you doing to prepare for this?’ And we didn’t know,” Lisa Grooms said. “How do you prepare? Every day is diffferent. One day we can have all the babies sleeping for three or four hours straight, and other days they’re all up at the same time and all want to eat at the same time. I don’t know what a normal day is yet.”

Because the triplets were premature, they weren’t all able to leave the hospital at the same time.

“We had one come home at a time so that kind of got us into a routine,” Lisa Grooms said. “Now all three are home, so it’s crazy. Just non-stop baby.”

The Grooms are thankful for their church friends who have offered to help.

"The people that have stepped up to help us have become like family to us," Lisa Grooms said. "They bring us meals, help with the babies, go grocery shopping and are here to just listen if we are needing to talk."

She is also grateful for Todd, who she says is “a wonderfully devoted husband and father to this family.”

“He gets up every day after two or three hours of sleep and drives an hour and a half to work and puts in eight hours, then comes home and puts in another eight hours,” she said.

How does he manage to keep going?

“He drinks a lot of Mountain Dew,” Lisa Grooms said. “God bless him.”

The birth of the triplets is especially poignant for Lisa Grooms, who suffered a heart attack at age 33 due to being morbidly obese.

“I was always a chunky kid,” she said. “I rewarded myself with food. Food was my comfort. I was eating a gallon of ice cream on my own in a sitting.”

She underwent an angioplasty to repair the damage to her heart. Her doctors also urged her to consider gastric bypass.

She did and “that’s what saved my life,” she said.

Because of her medical history, friends and family were concerned about her being pregnant with triplets.

“I was older and it was a multiple pregnancy and because of the heart attack everybody was nervous and asking, ‘Are you sure this is the right thing?’” Lisa Grooms said. “But as long as the doctors were monitoring me and taking care of me we were going to get through this.”

Working with her doctors, she was able to maintain a healthy weight during both pregnancies.

Though the triplets are now home from the hospital, special care still has to be taken to keep them healthy.

"Because the babies are premature, the first year of their life we have to be so careful not to bring them around too many people and to be overly cautious with everyday life with them," Lisa Grooms said. "Not many people understand that and think that because they are home we can go about everyday life as normal. Todd and I have to protect the babies and take extra special care of them along with our helpful caregivers."

In November, the Grooms will celebrate their three-year wedding anniversary with their four children.

“I thank God every day that we’re able to have this family,” Lisa Grooms said. “It’s been a pretty fantastic journey.”