Lots of research...

I am not sure what I was thinking when I started the actual construction of Sam's tree house. All I knew was that I needed to get going now - so he would have his tree house that summer.

Fortunately, we have nice big yard with lots of large trees. I have never built a tree house (like many dads) so I hit the bookstore and started to do my research.

I found a spot with three trees and decided that I would build a platform and put the tree house on the finished platform. I learned from my reading that trees move and the stress can bring down the best engineered efforts so I chose to "float" one end of the platform over a 4 inch by 12 inch beam. This should hold anything I put up there - or so I thought.

Sam was excited to see his tree house underway - and it made for a good distraction as we began to research pediatric neurosurgeons and our next steps. The small blessing was the rareness of Sam's tumor made every surgeon we called pick up the phone almost immediately. The first surgeon we met with in New York was an eye opener but at this point we felt we could see a way forward.

More than a tree house

"Everyone is going to have a tree house!", my five year-old Sam stated in a very concerned tone two years ago. He had been talking about it so much in kindergarten that everyone decided they wanted a tree house and I had promised him I would build him one.

Little did we know that Sam's world -and ours was about to change.

Sam had been having vision issues for about a year and we finally had an MRI scheduled in June of 2007 to make sure it was nothing more than just a "vision issue". Unfortunately, we came to learn that he had a rare brain tumor. As too many people know, when confronted with this type of news everything takes on an immediacy unmatched by anything in life...and so building a tree house became the most immediate thing in my life.