--- Memory lane: Aylmer triplets turn 30
Aylmer triplets turned 30 last week, and that’s something that doesn’t happen every day. Born on August 11, 1990, Alexandra, Gregory and Jennifer Valcov often get asked what it felt like to grow up as triplets. More often than not, they’ll reply with the same answer: what does it feel like to not be a triplet? “To us there’s no other difference,” Alexandra said, noting that it’s kind of like having your best friends alongside you all the time. For Alexandra, celebrating her 30th birthday up in Danford Lake, alongside her two thirds was very special.
Literally connected since the womb, Alexandra believes she and her “womb mates” have a very special bond that isn’t simple to explain. Gregory and Jennifer would be the first to agree. “There’s always a sense of never being misunderstood,” Alexandra said. “Like what you’re feeling or what you’re trying to say.”
From breaking into a song at the exact same time, finishing each other’s sentences or coincidentally having the same cellphone passwords, they just have a peculiar level of chemistry, not even a match for their three other siblings Christiana, Katherine and Elizabeth. “We don’t go through a day without calling each other,” Gregory said.
During high school at Philemon Wright, Alexandra recalled one time being accused of cheating on a math test because Gregory had the exact same answers as she did – despite not being in the same class. “They even called us into the office,” Gregory said with a laugh. “How do you get the same answers in math? There’s definitely a connection there.”
While seeing her family double overnight made motherhood an even tougher challenge, notably putting the emphasis a lot more on her family’s future than career prospects, their mother Anne Valcov wouldn’t trade it for anything. “I was lucky,” Valcov said, “The kids were happy and healthy and so were the triplets. We were blessed with that.”
Living on a large property in north Aylmer in the late 1980s, already raising three young girls, Anne and her husband, felt like adding a boy to the mix would perfectly round things out. Six months into the pregnancy, an ultrasound showed not one, not two, but three living, breathing fetuses in Anne’s uterus – one girl, one boy, but the other unidentified. “Until the delivery, we didn’t know what the third baby was,” Valcov said. “To our surprise, she was a girl. She was the first one out.”
Shortly after the triplets’ birth, their mother Anne Valcov was told the trio was first set of triplets Aylmer had seen. The triplets say they received their share of press coverage in their early years, notably from the Aylmer Bulletin.
