Associated Press

Tom and Allison Penn welcomed identical triplets last month. Tom Penn, a Roanoke native, said he and his wife painted a fingernail on each baby Virginia Tech maroon to tell them apart.

Photo courtesy of the Penn family

Logan (from left), Eli and Collin Penn have a grandmother who lives in Roanoke. Nola Penn said she will go to New York to visit her grandsons when she recovers from the flu.

The Penn boys arrived -- one, two, three -- on the last Wednesday in February. They were identical, a biological event with longer odds than hitting the Mega Millions lottery, by one estimate.

New York City TV stations rushed out to Long Island to see the triplets. They appeared in newspapers across the country and around the world with their grinning, exhausted parents. And one month later, as the babies gain an ounce a day, the family is adjusting to the typical tasks times three.

Grandmother Nola Penn, who lives in Roanoke, had to abandon the cover that she started knitting last fall when news first arrived that her son, Tom, and his wife, Allison, were expecting.

"I'd never get through three. One's taking me all this time," she said. Plus, the family already has blankets. "They need a minivan is what they need."

Diapers, however, can be crossed off the list. New York's North Shore University Hospital, where the babies were born, donated a two-year supply, Tom Penn said from his home in Patchogue, N.Y. And with three babies to practice on, he has become a speedy changer.

"It all happens in under a minute. Unless there's a big mess," he said.

Penn, a wildlife biologist, Roanoke native and Patrick Henry High School graduate, gave a short run down of the triplets' schedule: Every three hours, the boys are changed, fed and burped, which takes about an hour. He hopes to bump them up to a four-hour cycle soon.

"I was just catching a little nap," he said, after taking a phone call last week. "We're trying to squeeze in an hour whenever we can."

Penn, 46, and Allison Penn, 31, are both on leave from work, and Allison Penn's mother, Marianne McGuire, has joined them to help with parenting. Grandmother Penn is waiting to recover from a touch of the flu before she makes her first visit. (Grandfather Penn has passed away.)

To tell the boys apart, their parents have painted a fingernail on each with a coat of Virginia Tech maroon, for Tom Penn's alma mater: Logan, the oldest, on his thumb; Eli, on his index finger; and Collin, the youngest, on his middle finger.

Triplets were a surprise after four years of trying, their father said. Allison Penn was impregnated with a single embryo through in vitro fertilization. But the egg split, then half the pair split again. An early sonogram turned up one heartbeat, then a second and a third.

"I was basically, 'That's not possible,' " Tom Penn said.

The boys were born via Caesarean section Feb. 27, weighing between 4 and 5 pounds each. All three came home from the hospital a short four days later, and news of identical triplets quickly spread.

The family appeared on the morning shows "Today" and "The Early Show" earlier this month, often on little sleep. A cousin called to say the story had appeared in Ireland. A German TV show visited, too.

Odds of having identical triplets have been estimated at somewhere between 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 200 million, said Michelle Pinto, a spokeswoman with the North Shore hospital. (The large disparity is a likely result of triplets being wrongly considered identical, she explained.)

The odds of winning the Mega Millions lottery, according the Virginia Lottery Web site, are 1 in 176 million.

But even rarer, perhaps, are the odds of finding parents who don't dress their identical offspring in matching outfits -- be they twins, triplets or quadruplets.

"We're probably not going to go that route, except for the cute picture now and then," Tom Penn said. "We're going to stress being individuals."