Rating: 
Summary: Under My Xmas Tree
Review: I'm a sucker for those old-fashioned, big-family stories like "Cheaper By The Dozen" (now a Steve Martin movie, I see) and "Please Don't Eat The Daisies." This book turns out to be a real-life version that's wonderfully funny and warm and elegantly written, but it's also a deep and illuminating look inside the serious issues of what being a parent means in relation to career, marriage, ego, friends and family, and all the other complications of life. It's great to stumble across a book that really breaks new ground and I'm giving it to my husband and my girlfriends. Great details about the craziness of day-to-day life and wonderfully-drawn characters, too. Also a great book to read out loud.
Rating:
Summary: This is real life
Review: I'm an older, working, single mother of twins and this is a TERRIFIC book. I think Bruce self-effacingly doesn't convey how even harder it is than his descriptions. Please DO WRITE A SEQUEL -- I am dying to know, as my own children are growing up, how everyone turns out. Highest praise for a wonderful look at a situation much like my own -- this is what books are for: to give one an honest and deep look at another's reality for insights about our own life. Thank you, Dear Bruce and Roni and all four dear children.
Rating: 
Summary: big yawn
Review: If a woman had triplets and "decided" to stay home to care for them (mainly because she'd lost her job anyway), she wouldn't have a ghost of a chance of publishing a book about it. But a man does it, and he's supposed to be a saint? Give me a break. This book is boring and painful.
Rating:
Summary: Under My Xmas Tree
Review: My sister gave me this book for Mother's Day because I was complaining about how my husband would rather watch the Braves or Falcons than play with the kids. What an amazing and incredible book! The author is a magazine editor married to a lawyer, and they have a fairly typical role-reversal marriage--he takes care of the kid on nights and weekends, she does renovation projects--but their lives are turned upside down when they have triplets. The way he writes about his feelings for his kids, and his tensions with his wife, are incredibly honest and hilariously true. The author loses his job, becomes a full-time stay-at-home Dad, they move to the suburbs, they suffer a death in the family--it's really a roller coaster ride, and the writing is just beautiful. I laughed out loud and I cried. I read some reviews where they didn't like the wife, but I did--she's a real person, with good and bad sides, and not a black and white character like in most memoirs. I can't get my husband to read the book--but all my girlfriends have and I'm giving it to my mother-in-law for Xmas--my last hope. She'll understand!
Rating:
Summary: Cheap title/soulful book. A classic.
Review: Oh my God. You'll laugh, you'll cry. You will think YOUR life is easy and manageable. You will count your blessings, because the author shows you how. This guy is honest (example: he states that he loves his son more than he loves his wife early on in the book), can really turn a phrase, and loves, loves, loves his (older son) Asher and his babies. I would love to meet him at Starbucks and have a cup of coffee. He is a man who gets it! How about a sequel or two? The kids are only about 7 and 3 when it ends. God bless this lovely, human man.
Rating:
Summary: Comforting and Hilarious Words About Real Parenthood
Review: Right after I gave birth to my son, Anne LaMott's Operating Instructions was my bible. It told very real, accurate and funny stories about the weird world we all occupy during our children's first year. This book does it times 3 or 4. I enjoyed Stocklers real-life tale of taking a small army to the grocery store or trying to find a clean bathroom in a shopping mall. Funny, touching and emotionally literate. This is what it's really like - the tremendous pride and happiness, the self-doubt, the humor that only sleep deprivation can produce. It's refreshing to read about the emotional experiences of a man who is a stay-at-home dad. He is ruthless in his observation of the corporate world and how truly family -unfriendly it is. This is a great baby present for any expecting family. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: Family Values, Great Writing
Review: The author is a humor writer who uses his skills to dig deep down inside the unique and chaotic situation of his home life--having triplets, losing his job, becoming a stay at home Dad, trying to work through a difficult marriage--by paying attention to the little details that make a story absorbing and pulling back to reveal how much energy it takes to change the course of your life. A really joyful, liberating look at fatherhood and family life that deserves a much wider audience than the baby book ghetto it has been lumped into.
Rating:
Summary: What a disaster
Review: The further I read in this book, the more obvious it became that Stockler's wife, Roni, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. She's an extreme workaholic. On the rare occasions when her work schedule allows a spare moment for her family, she wastes her precious time folding and re-folding the triplets' baby clothes to give them "razor-sharp" fold lines, or sets off on a shopping trip for the perfect baby carriage, or starts yet another home-improvement project that will never be finished. Also, Stockler--who becomes the babies' sole caretaker--shows himself incapable of disciplining them. In the grocery store... during their chaotic lights-out bedtime routine...in the women's restroom that he and the kids commandeer during an endless visit--it's obvious who's in charge: the kids. This family's situation isn't cute or funny. It's sad.
Rating:
Summary: I couldn't stand this couple!
Review: The further into this book I got, the more annoyed I became at Stockler and his wife, Roni, surely two of the most dysfunctional people ever chronicled in nonfiction. One has to wonder at their motives in going through the in-vitro fertilization process AGAIN when she is already working 90-hour weeks, he works 40-plus-hour weeks, and as a consequence their two-year-old son is being raised by a nanny. After the triplets are born, it gets worse. Despite Roni's brutal work schedule that effectively makes Bruce a single parent whenever he's home, she's got the nerve to tell him that he spends too much time with the kids (p. 172). What's more, when she does have a few spare hours on the weekends, she leaves home on expeditions for cheap baby furniture and the like. Her avoidance of family time borders on the bizarre. Both of them display a number of other repellent traits, such as an inability to throw anything away or finish a single project, so that their apartment becomes a stuffed-to-the-gills freak spot. Again, what made them think they were ready to handle another kid? Neverthless, from his description of daily interaction with his four children, Stockler sounds like an excellent father. I'm hoping that before the book ends, he'll report that he dumped weird Roni and married a woman who actually likes her family enough to be with them on evenings and weekends.
Rating:
Summary: not worth the money
Review: There are thousands of couples out there who have triplets. Big Whoop!!
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