After the wiggling, flopping, and humming settles into snuggling my two Littles start noticing Grace's piano music.  Lately Grace has been starting her sessions with "Star Wars" themes before working on her music because she knows the Littles enjoy it. 

The first time Grace sight-read through Darth Vader's Theme I was still in the Littles' bedroom watching them settle down.  I could see Jack's eyes looking off into space as he relaxed into his pillow, his eyes tracking from side to side as Grace played.  At her first stumble his eyes froze, only to resume tracking as she resumed playing.  Anytime she had to pause to work out the music his eyes stopped tracking and he almost seemed to hold his breath, waiting for the musical resolution.  

I'd love for both Littles to be musically inclined but if the end result of their early exposure to music is merely less time required memorizing math facts... it's all good.

Hi Momma....

Please Mother, notice my adorableness and allow me to rest upon thy lap.

Either Samuel is in my lap- or I have the smallest feet of any 5' 6" tall knitter around.

Today while painting a picture and sipping some milk he announced loudly, "My Body neeeeeds a brownie."  From equilibrium to manipulation at the speed of a toddler's brain.  

I've seen an unusual amount of boy movies this rainy, rainy vacation-week, which I hope accounts for the dream I had last night:

  

My children, a man in a red uniform, and I were on a mission to steal a military device of mass destruction from the enemy.  The enemy was of course Darth Vader and he had hidden the plans in his home. 

We were ransacking Vader's Los Angeles home while Vader was in suspended animation on his back lawn.  The device was discovered right as Darth Vader was accidently awoken by the man in the red uniform.  Vader made short work of the man in red.  There was a mad dash to get all my children and my little ones buckled into their car seats so that our van, which is evidently capable of interplanetary flight, could make the leap to lightspeed.  

I was almost happy to be woken up at 5:20 a.m. by a little one.   Do you know how hard it is to buckle a 2 yo and a 3 yo into their seats while Darth Vader is coming after you?  Most stressful.

Jack, the 3 yo, explained to me that the freshly headless bird delivered to our front door by the cat was in fact there because, "A bird was flying over the door mat and died and fell out of the sky."

Ben and Bekah, the 7 and 10 yos, laughed and laughed about the possibility of a world in which birds fly about until their heads spontaneously pop off, causing them to fall from the sky- onto door mats everywhere.

Evening:

Grace, the 15 yo, decided that Mrs Gibson from "Wives and Daughters" was far more detestable than Mrs Bennett from "Pride and Prejudice". She also noted, in a genre change, that as I am now 42, I must be the answer... if anyone could remember the question.

Luke, the 17 yo, decided that along with recent compensation disclosure rulings for bloggers, the FTC ought to require a percentage of Facebook profile photos to be realistically uncomplimentary. He decided to set an example of (uncompensated) full disclosure below.

Samuel shouts, "Juice" again, and then quivering from head to toe,  throws the now empty cup.  The cup bounces comically off my head with such force that it ricochets and knocks my bedside lampshade askew.  Now I am wide awake.  Samuel is not quivering with rage, he is quivering from a blood sugar crisis.  His first one. I'm too familiar with the symptoms of hypoglycemia in Jack not to recognize them in Sam, especially when hit in the head.  A handful of raisins later a suddenly calm Sam politely asks for breakfast.

Sam's first crisis occurred almost exactly a year after Jack's first hospitalization.  A year in which we were told that Sam was probably fine, probably free from the genetic disorder that Jack has.  It was also the morning of a chapter meeting of The United Mitochondria Foundation.  I went on to the meeting (my first one ever), feeling unreal from the events of the morning.  Have you ever had allergies that made your eyes water uncontrollably?  After I got to the meeting, that's what happened to my eyes.  They just started "leaking".  I quietly went to the rest room a couple of times and held paper towels to my eyes- willing them to behave, only to have them start watering again within 10 minutes.  The meeting's featured speaker spoke on grief.  She stressed dealing with the grief of chronic illness or your grief would "splash" over into other areas of your life when you least expect it.  Duh, I was the better than any power point presentation, exhibit A in "splashing".

During the following brunch I took the opportunity to corner the geneticist who is on the board of the local UMDF chapter.  He'd seen Jack before, so I re-introduced myself and asked if a normal child in the absence of an acute illness could just happen to have episodes of blood sugars in the 40's that resolve with carbohydrates.  A long pause followed, during which I'm sure he was thinking something along the lines of, "Crap, she's already looks stressed and she's asking me a loaded and stupid question, and the door to the room is blocked by the bloke eating cake."  He of course advised me to get in touch with our doctors and start Samuel on corn starch at night until he was seen...

My eyes continued to leak off and on for a couple of days.  I wasn't prostrated on my bed with  flower petals scattered across the floor during this time.  I was cracking jokes with Greg and the kids, doing chores- doing all the normal weekend stuff.  Just occasionally my eyes would start streaming.  It was completely unlike anything I've experienced before.  Samuel, whom we had thought was our round, sweet, sturdy, healthy, bonus-baby was suddenly all those things minus the healthy.  Yet at the same time I knew we were so blessed to already know the basics of how to recognize and handle metabolic issues.

I knew that Samuel's diagnosis would be difficult.  Our family doesn't bother with garden variety illnesses.  I was right, a few months later and we are working with a diagnosis of Ketotic Hypoglycemia for Samuel, but we don't really know.  Lately he's been having more frequent morning episodes of hypoglycemia even on his corn starch regime.  I'm watching, praying and researching, but I'm not "leaking" anymore.  However, I don't think it was such a bad thing.  Embarrassing perhaps, but the slow release of tears as I went on with normal life was a bizarrely helpful way to process my grief and fears.  

Moms are all about multi-tasking, I just never thought to multi-task grief before.