I truly believe Sammy is an old soul. I read somewhere, once, that old souls never return in “healthy” bodies. There’s just something about him, about the way he just knows things that I wonder if it’s really a two year old in that little body.
This isn’t a mommy post bragging about how smart my son is. (We all know that already. ) Instead, it just a post about my wonder at his love of all things music. He can identify almost every major instrument (including the oboe and the bassoon!). He can hear music and tell you, with decent accuracy, what instrument he hears. (We play classical music for him all night, and when we’re putting him to bed, it’s not unusual for him to stop, put his hand to his ear and say, “Oh – I hear a violin! I hear a flute!” If we are out and he hears music, he will stop until he can locate the speaker it’s coming from.) When he picks up an instrument, he will count it off and then tap his foot to keep rhythm while he plays.
I truly believe there is music in his old soul. We could not have taught him the things he knows.
I took out my violin for him after his nap – he had never seen a real violin before, just ones on TV and on the computer. He immediately tried to put it up at his chin and hold the bow as you would expect a violinist to hold a bow. Then he placed the violin between his legs and drew the bow across the “cello”. Finally, he held it next to him and told us he was playing the bass.
Has he been exposed to music since birth? Yes. Has he watched way too many episodes of Little Einsteins. Yes. But the way he lights up when he plays his saxophone or his clarinet, the way he makes us play in a band with him, the way he makes anything into a tuba or an oboe – there’s got to be more to it. It comes too naturally for him. It must have come with him from wherever he was before. And I can’t wait to see what he does with it as he grows.

Not sure how many of you are cheesy celeb hounds, but I do enjoy a mindless hour or two skimming through a good celeb mag every now and then (or every week, as the case may be when US Weekly shows up in my mailbox).
Anyway – I had managed to get my current subscription for free and was lamenting over the fact that it was soon to run out, and there was NO WAY IN HELL I was paying $80 for a new subscription.
Enter slickdeals. Oh, how I love thee!
Discount Mags (legit site) has 1-year subscription to US Weekly (52 issues) for $5.97 with code SLICKDEALS valid for new subscriptions only. (Which, best I can decipher from what I’ve read, means new subscriptions through them.)
It will say $79 until you get to the screen with the promo code. And from what I can tell, you can only order once – I tried ordering for someone and it wouldn’t change the price to $6.
I believe this ends tonight (though I’m not certain), so jump on it while you can, if you’re actually reading in the three remaining hours. If not, you can still always try, right?
Enjoy!
EDITED: The above deal no longer works. You can use the code UsWeekly70 to get 70% off, which brings the price down to $23.98. Still not too shabby a deal.

Why is it that on the days you really, really need them to nap, they do whatever is the complete opposite of nap – bounce off the walls, roll down the stairs, throw balls through the halls, spin around until they fall on the ground?
(And let’s be honest here: a) we need them to nap everyday, and b) it’s just as much for us as it is for them.)
Sammy isn’t a bad kid – not by any stretch of the imagination. But he is a toddler. And with toddlerhood comes afternoons like today, times of testing boundaries and the limits of an already-exhausted mama’s energy: dumping handfuls of cat foot into the cat water. Learning how to fill – and overfill – his cups of water at the water cooler. Tiptoeing closer and closer to whatever it is I’ve told him not to go near. Not bad things, just exhausting things.
It makes it all the more difficult that he’s giggling and so damn cute while he’s doing them.
Not difficult things, but damn cute ones:
Me (while changing his diaper): Hey Sammy – where’s your belly button?
Sammy (slightly confused, as it was tucked under his diaper): Oh no! It’s gone! We need to buy another one!
He has one of those plastic microphone things that echoes his voice. He’s obsessed with the book, Punk Farm. Sure enough, he was running around, yelling into the microphone (I kid you not): ARE YOU READY TO ROOCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKK?
And then, after banging on his piano: THANK YOU WISCONSIN!!!
It almost made up for the MIA nap. Almost. I foresee an early bedtime tonight. And some wine for mama. Yes, definitely some wine.

I’ve come here several times recently – opened up MT and stared at the blank box waiting for words.
How many times can I write about how absolutely amazing my son is? Or about how terrified I am of his surgery? Or about how every time I open my email, I dread the message we’re expecting from his cardiologist with the date – the date that is maybe 2, 3 months away?
Do you know how short 2 months is?
He has started hugging us tight at night. He says, “I love you!” when I leave for work. He said thank you, unprompted, when his friend handed him a toy today. He has music in his blood and would fall asleep holding his “saxamaphone” if we let him (which we do, sometimes). He still naps in his swing and I can’t bring myself to move him off bottles of milk yet. It’s a little piece of his babyhood I’m not willing to let go of just yet.
I was talking with my friend the other day about our kids growing up – that one day they will come home from school and go to their room and close the door. That one day, we won’t know every little thing that happens to them. And I realize – I’ve had no problem with Sammy growing up. Sure, I’ve had little meltdowns when I realize that he’s never going to be as small as he is right now, but on the other hand, the closer we get to that magical five-year mark, the better off we are in the long-term with his heart. I can handle getting him to five. I have no problem with the time passing to get us to five. But after that? Dropping him off at kindergarten?
Excuse me while I curl up and cry.
I do a lot of that lately. Crying, that is.
I shouldn’t. But I can’t help it. We are a mere few weeks from handing him over again, from waiting, waiting, waiting while they do things to his body that make the inside me want to scratch and crawl out of my own skin. I know that once it’s over, we’ll be okay. I know that once we’re there, we move into hospital mode and it’s so different than real-world mode. But I dread not being able to comfort him, dread him not understanding what’s happening to him and being scared and angry about it all. I know he’ll bounce back from it, but I dread the time while we’re going through it. How do you explain all of it to a two-year old? I am grateful for these surgeries, as we wouldn’t even have him here with us today without them, but on the other hand – how awful for a small child who is just beginning to understand the world to have to go through. How does that make sense in what he knows the world to be? Where will the pain and fear fit into his experience? Will he be mad at us? How will I handle that?
And sometimes, just sometimes, all the what-ifs creep in. Sure, Boston had something wonderful like a 99% Fontan survival rate last year. But what if?
I can’t cope with that. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to cope with normal, everyday things. Other days, I’m doing okay. Other times, still, I think it would be best for all involved if I just pulled the covers over my head and slept it all away, slept for days and weeks until I have the energy to cope again. And other days, something sets me off and I get so angry that I have a hard time calming down. (Beware, giant vehicles parked in the Compact Car section!) I keep promising myself that I will get better after this surgery. I have to, right? After all, I imagine there’s only so long they’ll let me keep my Ativan. Heh.

So Sammy has expressed a renewed interest in potty training. We haven’t pushed the issue, since who knows what time in the hospital and the surgery are going to do in that arena. We figure we’ll let him go at his own pace.
The other day I brought him into the wonderland that is our basement. (After the first time I brought him down there, he told a friend, “That’s where the toys all live!”) He spied his little trainer potty and proceeded to scream for half an hour, complete with foot stomping and pulling on the door handle, until I went downstairs and brought it up.
So today I figured – he’s sporting a little bit of a rash, I’d let him run around sans-bottoms for a while. Sure enough, he told me when he had to go on the potty, and sure enough, he peed on the potty. Go, Sammy!
But not before I caught him sitting quietly on the couch. When I asked him what he was doing, he casually replied, “I’m wiggling my peepee.”
And so it begins. Boys. Sigh.

It’s hard not to be in awe of the staff at Children’s Hospital Boston, from the support staff to the nurses to the cardiologists to the surgeons. Everyone moves and works together as a finely tuned machine – they’re incredible in every aspect of the word.
When we first met Sammy’s surgeon, the impression was everything we expected a pediatric heart surgeon at one of the top hospitals in the world to be: intelligent. Well-spoken. Confident, if not slightly cocky. We told ourselves that we wouldn’t want him any other way – the last thing you want is someone unsure of themselves working on your child’s tiny, tiny heart! Could you imagine? “Hey… you, nurse – what do you think I should do next?” Eeek!
Then we met him again before Sammy’s second surgery, and this time I saw a whole new side to him. He was kind and reassuring. That cockiness we saw in those overwhelming first few days after Sammy’s birth was replaced by someone who really seemed to understand the terror of handing over your child. He was still confident, but this time that awe was replaced with a deep respect for him and what he does – and what he was about to do to our child.
I just received an email from another heart mom who informed me that CHB is doing a mission in Ghana:

A 24-member team from the Cardiovascular Program undertook a one-week mission to provide cardiac care to needy children in Ghana. These clinical services are unavailable to the population of 25 million Ghanaians due to lack of infrastructure, chronic economic problems and lack of specialized training. Over the course of the week, 50 children were evaluated and eight were selected for surgical repair. We provided all the diagnostic, operating room and ICU equipment necessary through generous donations to our mission. We were able to provide same high quality care that we have come to expect within our cardiovascular program in Boston.

Sure enough, Sammy’s surgeon was there. Here’s a link to his profile. Amazing. I have such respect for those who help bring medical care to areas lacking in the quality of care we are so blessed to have here in the U.S. According to the site, “The country contains 25 million inhabitants and exactly 25 trained cardiologists — one for every one million inhabitants, as opposed to one in ten thousand in the developed world.”
My respect for CHB and Dr. Fynn-Thompson just deepened. Each day I am beyond grateful that we live so close to CHB, and I often think about what it would have been like had Sammy been born elsewhere in the world. It’s very likely he wouldn’t be here with us today. While I dread the coming weeks as we prepare for the Fontan, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude that we have such great care and such a compassionate, skilled surgeon just miles down the road from us.
Pretty darn cool. You go with your bad self, FFT!

Alexandra was born last night just before midnight Seattle time. The labor wasn’t without its ups and downs, but in the end, mama and baby did wonderfully. (Thank you all for your happy-healthy-baby-pushing vibes!) She was five weeks early, so she’s in the NICU on CPAP to help her lungs out a bit. I won’t meet her until May or June when my sister, her husband and baby girl move from Washington to about 45 minutes away from where we now live.
I am so wishing I was there right now. I want to hug my sister. I’m so proud of her.
Sammy has been walking around all morning talking about how the baby came out of Aunt Melanie’s tummy because she “pushed, pushed, PUSHED!” complete with arm and hand motions like he’s pushing some other kid really hard out of his way. It’s actually pretty darn cute. Then he says something bizarre like, “There’s a baby in daddy’s tummy, and mommy’s tummy, and Grandpa’s tummy and my tummy too!” and he lifts his shirt and proudly shows us his belly.
Clearly we need to work on this “where babies come from” bit.
Eeeee. I can’t wait to meet her. I can’t wait until they’re out here. My sister – the mommy!.
Welcome to the world, little girl. We love you so much already.

My sister’s water broke at 3 this morning (our time). She’s doing fine, 1 cm, 50% effaced, contractions aren’t bad yet – but she’s only 35 weeks. Sooooooooo…. if you could take a minute or two and send easy-labor vibes and mature-lungs-healthy-baby vibes her way, I’d appreciate it!
My folks have a noon flight out of NY, so here’s hoping things are easy and relatively painless and that the baby waits to make her arrival until they get out to Washington (state).
Eeeeeeeeeeeeee! The baby’s almost here!!!!!