Samantha and Kevin Jolicoeur knew something was off about their son Gideon from the moment he was born.
“He had several oddities that nobody could figure out,” Samantha tells PEOPLE. “The doctors were concerned because he had an overly large fontanel. He had a sacral dimple and a high-arched palate that made it difficult to nurse.” (The anterior fontanel is one of the soft spots between the bones in an infant’s skull and a sacral dimple is an indentation in the skin on a newborn’s lower back, according to the Mayo Clinic.)
During the first few weeks of Gideon’s life, Samantha and Kevin noticed that their baby was often fussy and cried a lot — doctors chalked it up to colic.
“He was so upset all the time, like he didn’t know what was going on,” Samantha says. “So one of the things my husband decided one day to do to try to calm him down was to blow raspberries on his cheek … My husband was just trying to find a way to calm him down and it was hilarious because every time he did it, Gideon would stop crying.”