You can't have identical triplets?

I'm stating the obvious when I say that people are competitive. I mean, there are so many ways for us to become hung up on competition - sports, work, fashion, school and even blogging. This competitive nature also extends to the activities of our children. For some parents, anyway.

As a mom of a child with spina bifida, I think my view of the world is a little bit different. Of course I want my children to excel and to be awesome at whatever they do but maybe my measure of these achievements is different from those of other parents.

The daughter of a friend of mine has been participating in competitive cheerleading for the past four years. She is seven years old. I have heard the stories of how competitive the moms at her gym can be and so I was somewhat expecting to see this at our gym this past year with the girls' gymnastics class. We really didn't. There was one slightly annoying mom but her daughter is a year older and has moved up to the kindergarten class.

I will admit that I was extremely happy when Allie was placed in the front row during the year end big gymnastics show. Maybe I even gloated over it. My baby was considered one of the better performers. But as you all know, I was extremely proud of all three of my girls and what they achieved this past year, especially Anna, who wasn't supposed to be able to walk on her own.

The girls were enrolled in a summer gymnastics program mainly to keep them busy. Give them something to do each Wednesday. We didn't register them with the intent of keeping up their skills or pushing them to excel beyond their peers. Grammy is the one who brings the girls to class and reports back to me with what happened at the gym that day. About halfway through the summer session, a new girl sat in on one of their classes for a 'trial run'. That's what the new mom told Grammy, anyway. She asked Grammy a lot of questions and was really scrutinizing the gym and the coaches. For example, all of the girls were running around at the beginning of class to warm up.

New mom: "Why aren't they providing them with any instruction? Shouldn't the coaches be telling them what to do?"

Grammy: "Ahhhh.... They're warming up."

Apparently, the trial run went well enough because the girl and her mom appeared at each class after that. Grammy tells me that the mom is very critical of one of the coaches for reasons that, we both agree, are extremely superficial.

If you've been a reader of my blog, you know that we receive a lot of comments and are asked a lot of questions about the girls. And for the most part, everyone is kind and polite. Mostly because of comments and statements I heard after Abbey died, I recognize that people are sometimes ignorant. It's not their fault that they don't have experience with stillbirth and keeping their mouths shut would be best but their ignorance of the situation causes them to say something hurtful.

And so now we have Gym Mom, as I have nicknamed her. Here is the conversation that occurred between Grammy and Gym Mom a few weeks ago:

Gym Mom: "Did I hear you tell someone that they are identical triplets?"

Grammy: "Yes."

Gym Mom: "That's impossible, you know."

Grammy: "What?"

Gym Mom: "You can't have identical triplets. Everyone knows that it's always twins and an odd one."

Grammy: "No, they are identical triplets. Several doctors have told my daughter so."

Gym Mom: "Well, they don't look identical to me. They look nothing alike."

That conversation has been filed away as the best conversation ever regarding the girls. I laughed and laughed when Grammy told me this. Laughed. And then it happened again the next week. She insisted on telling Grammy, who I'm sure was minding her own business, that the girls look nothing alike and cannot be identical. I thought she would have gone home and googled "identical triplets" but apparently, she did not.

Whatever her intent and whether it was made out of jealousy, ignorance or competitiveness, I just don't understand.

As of last week, her daughter was enrolled in a class for the new year on a different day but Grammy believes that Gym Mom is going to change the day because of the coaches. These kind of things blow my mind. We originally signed the girls up for gymnastics as an activity to get them out of the house. I wasn't pushing for one of them to become a competitive gymnast. Who knows? Maybe one of them will and I would be very supportive of that. I feel like there's this pressure in today's society to start kids in activities and sports when they are barely out of pull-ups or they will be behind their peers. What if I had waited until the girls were in first grade to start with gymnastics? They would have missed out on three years of instruction. Crazy!

A bit off topic but the girls watched their very first episode of Toddlers and Tiaras while we were in Michigan. It was one of those nights at my grandparents' house. The girls were all overheated and exhausted and us adults were attempting to finish our meal in some type of relaxed state. The only age appropriate show I could find was Toddlers and Tiaras. I was surprised at how it entrapped the girls. They sat quietly on the couch, transfixed by the commotion of a beauty pageant. We even had to move chairs around so that they could view the end of the show while eating their ice cream.

Allie, with her eyes all big and round and her voice all serious, kept saying, "I think Story is going to win." And the winner was Story! TLC, if you are reading this, I just want to point out that even a four year old can figure out that the girl who receives the most air time is the winner.