As my ever-loyal readers already are aware, I have oodles of babies.
Okay, three children, but it is far funnier to think of me as living in a shoe somewhere with rug-rats climbing all over me, isn’t it? So anyway, my three kids arrived in this order: Girl, boy, girl.
The boy, my little monkey in the middle, he’s the one I am telling you about today.
This guy-
-also known as Ringo. (Ringo is his middle name. My choice- Lazybones picked his first name. And before you ask- yes he does drum.)
In fact he was drumming so much that it was a little, well… odd (I still insist that he was tapping out rhythms in the womb but I realize this is a far-fetched claim). He also underwent a bizarre change when we moved to Italy.
If ONLY he’d started saying “ciao bella!” all the time!
No, instead he went from his usual perky, engaging little self to a different mode, where he was disinterested in food, toys, and hugs. The only toys he enjoyed at all were circles- the little rings that go on the stacker, plastic cups, things like that. He liked to watch those spin around and settle on the floor. They stopped, he dropped ‘em again. Over and over.
And he drummed- and drummed and drummed. But he also lost weight, didn’t talk, and didn’t even try to walk. Mommy was someone to be wriggled away from, never cuddled. Needless to say, this prompted the doctors to begin looking closely at him, testing, pinching, poking, and generally making him afraid to even step into the clinic anymore. That was fun when mommy needed to go in for the prenatal visits that preceded tiny George’s birth.
So, we got him interested in food (well, sort of, he’s picky as hell) and he came back up on his growth chart, started working with Early Intervention here, and we got him saying a few words, playing with some toys, occasionally looking at us when we spoke to him, all that stuff, but he still is considerably behind the power curve as far as his early childhood milestones go.
Now I sat here watching him wave his hands, rock in his chair, spin his toys and drum on everything from the TV set to his newborn sister’s fuzzy little head, and I wondered why, if he was doing all these decidedly quirky things, none of the doctors or Early Intervention folks we’d worked with had even said the “A” word to us. Huh?
Even he’s thinking… “Dude, WTF?”
Seriously. I never read up on autism- I have known one or two autistic kids/adults in my life- but I was seeing this tiny red flag popping up over his head when he’d do all these wacky little things. I just waited. We reviewed with Early Intervention after a year and the boy, he had improved so much he was like a different kid all over again- but he still was doing these things that were making bells go off for me.
Shit- Lazybones does stuff that makes the same red flags and bells pop up, but he’s a grown adult and has done just fine, so I am not particularly worried.
It took until this last month for them to evaluate his behavior for signs of autism.
Guess what?
They have now decided that he does indeed fall into the broad spectrum of autism-related “disorders” (hey, order is overrated in my opinion anyway- so bring the disorder ON, baby), and now we’ve suddenly got this new label. I wonder if they think I am crazy though, as a parent, for being glad to finally hear it? If I know something is wrong and it’s not just that I am forgetting how to raise him, maybe I will cope with it better. I’ve laid awake more than a few nights on (or over) the edge of tears, wondering why I can’t communicate with my son.
But mommy’s little buddy-
He’s still happy, funny, clever and has long since decided that mommy is perfectly fine for hugging, so I don’t think things are too bad, in his world.
