We found out when I was 20 weeks he had three holes in the heart and his pulmonary artery was very narrow so at that point they said he had a 1 in 3 chance of having downs syndrome, so we just prepared for that and read up on everything. With Martin and I, as soon as we started thinking about having children, we thought "our child is our child no matter what and we will love it for who it is, and who they are". So that's it, as soon as we found out, it had no effect really on our family status anyway; Sam was going to be Sam no matter what.

We've had mixtures. It's been people want to either cuddle him, kiss him and hold him and just want to be around him all the time, or they just don't want to be near him at all. There's never an in between, they either like him and love him or they just don't understand who he is at all. It's very strange because we have people saying 'oh, isn't he gorgeous, isn't he lovely' and we say 'oh he's got Downs Syndrome' and they just walk away, so all of a sudden he's not gorgeous or lovely and you just think, well why? They just don't understand. I think people need to be educated.

There was a loop in his intestines that was blocked so he couldn't eat anything and he couldn't pass anything through, so they had to cut that out and then sew it back together, for his intestines. It wasn't a straightforward operation because they found all of his bile ducts and his pancreas ducts were all webbed together as well so they had to cut those as well and rejoin them and that was quite scary. But Sam being Sam he just kind of fought through and surprised everybody and turned around and was off the ventilator in two days.

Yes he was in the hospital for three full weeks and then came home. He had a tube down his nostril to go into his stomach because he couldn't breath and with having his heart problems he didn't have a lot of energy. So when he had his bottle it used to take him an hour / an hour and a half to have just 4 ounces, so he was actually losing more weight than he was gaining just feeding, so eventually we had to just feed him whatever he took in 15 minutes and then put the rest down his tube. So then we had to extract his bile if that didn't pass through so we were nurses for the first couple of months when he came home. We had a lot of help - community nurses came out and we were shown how to put the tube down.