A few years back, in April, a friend asked how we had gotten my son diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. I told her that I would share that journey one day. Truly I had hoped to do it before now; however, with the life being so hectic, I just didn't know how to write it. We'll see how I do with it now. And I'm guessing that this will be a multiple part blog.....so here's attempt number one...
Gabriel was an easy baby. He was induced with pitosin and evicted naturally out of the womb with IV drugs only. He was jaundice, so much so that I think any other pediatrician would have put him in a blanket contraption. But Gabe truly was an easy baby. He smiled easily, laughed often and was easily contented. His lullaby put him to sleep almost every night with ease. I bragged about him eating almost everything, nursing like a champ and sleeping wonderfully! Going through the stages, I really don't remember any major problems with physical development, motor issues, but speech was another issue.
As a mom who is fluent in sign language, I exposed him early to signs. Typically, by six months normally developing children start signing. Well, Gabe didn't follow the typically developing child in this area. I thought to myself, huh, that's odd - but didn't really think a lot about it because I didn't know if I was doing ENOUGH to have him start signing back to me. After turning one and starting to babel a little, I got excited and tried to get him to communicate and get those verbal skills working!
Here's where my problems started. Notice I say, "my." I started noticing that Gabe was almost delayed in his speech and language production. With me teaching the Deaf & Hard of Hearing, I'm around speech pathologists all the time and am friends with quite a few of them. So, each one I knew, I asked what the deal is. And I got the same response, "Melissa, he is a boy, and he's within the normal range. Quit worrying! He's fine!" Love them all, because it made me feel good, and they were right - he was within the normal range and being a boy, he could have been later on the normal range than what he was. Trusting my friends and intelligent colleagues, I quit worrying.
Then it was the next school year and my kid was just plain weird! I remember sitting in a speech clinicians office at school and crying during one of our lunch gatherings, because my kid was developing wonderfully, but he was weird. I explained to my friend that my Gabriel at almost three years old was talking in paragraphs. When he did something, he held out until he really knew how to do it and then went full force. He didn't stay at the one and two word utterances like he was supposed to - he went to sentences and then jumped into paragraphs. I told them the story about how my aunt and uncle were watching Gabe, and he asked, "Where are my parents?" Not, "where's mommy and daddy," not "where's my momma," not an easy child-like thing to say - oh, no, it's skips right to the college educated kid, "where are my parents?" So this time, my speech friend kind of giggled and laughed. I was worried because my child who has college educated parents is speaking above the level of other children his age. That's ludicrous! Why would someone worry about that? Well, because I'm kinda a worrier, lol. So, my loving friend encouraged me to question my doctor about it since I am so worried......
Funny enough, it worked out that Gabe had some minor sickness and was in to our family's MD in the next few weeks. His dad took him in, and I urged him to inform the doctor about his speech patterns and level of expressive vocabulary, his skipping around in speech development. I plagued Gabe's dad to death about how worried I was over this miniscule thing. And, with full confidence that this would be addressed, they went into the doctor's office. The family MD is a wonderful guy and was nagged at by Gabe's dad about Gabe's language development; listing off everything on my list, however, the doctor saw no indication for concern. In fact, Gabriel was complimented for aforementioned language development, due to his statement of, "Can I have a lollipop, please, Dr. INSERT NAME HERE" By this point, I was done being concerned....all of my speech friends had been supportive and encouraging me that there were no problems, and now the doctor agrees there are no problems.
This is where I will stop on this post and say, "To be continued........."
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