I love you and I hate you... music videos from children's hospitals

Have you ever listened to a song so many times you don't know if you love it or hate it...

let me explain...

Jilli has a youtube playlist titled "Hospital Songs." It is 19 videos that play over and over in our lives. When in the hospital... getting blood drawn... feeling tired.. or worried... or anxious... these songs are requested.

I hear them but yet I don't when they are on. Sometimes we go weeks between hearing them and in other seasons they play all the time. They get us through hospital stays and scary tests. Lydia joins right in dancing to them.

These are not a random collection of songs. Each one was filmed in a children's hospital somewhere in the world. That is very comforting to Jilli.

Many of the videos share the same songs as these songs seam to be popular with hospitals making their over music video. Roar, Brave, Fight Song, Shake it Off, Stronger, Thats What makes you Beautiful. I think more artists need to make songs with those same themes... and I vote more hospitals should make music videos...

For me, sometimes I struggle to hold back tears while listening to those songs. They have been played in some of our darkest moments. Other times I am grateful for them... how happy they make Jilli and for them supporting her through hard things. In times when they keep her calm during a blood draw I am so thankful. Listening to Jilli sing them again after being sick sometimes is more then my eyes can hold back. Her music therapist knows her favorites and they sing them together.


I love these songs but yet some days they sting...

But they remind me that many things in our life are that way. Joy and pain are often connected in the tensions of life. We choose to look at our life with the lens of "how can we find joy in this?" and some days that is hard and takes some work, but there is joy... even in listening to the same song for the thousandth time.

Jilli with her music therapist Melissa at Ronald McDoanld House