If you've stumbled across this blog you're either a family member or some random other person out there who may also be facing the challenges of autism in your children or someone you love. If you're in the second group I hope you can find something in here that can be of use as you look for ways to work with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). This blog will serve two purposes. First, it is a journal for me and my wife so we can keep track of the things we try, what works, what doesn't work, how often it was tried, etc. Second, if we find something that is incredibly successful hopefully someone else out there can benefit from our story.
We're your typical, middle class, white, American family. I'm Paul (a teacher), and I married Lisa (a nurse) in 2005. We had our first child, Eva Kate, in September of 2009 and our second child, Mollie, in August of 2011.
Eva seemed to progress normally. She met all her typical milestones in her first 12 months. She rolled over, sat up, babbled, crawled, and played like every other baby. She was the perfect baby. She was extremely happy, smiley, and hardly every fussed. The nursery workers were always delighted to keep her because she was the easiest kid to care for. At home she always did a great job entertaining herself and never really needed our attention unless she was hungry or sleepy. We considered ourselves lucky...little did we know that such extreme levels of independence could be a sign of autism.
Eva's first slight sign of delay was that she didn't walk until 13 months. Even though all our other friends' kids walked earlier, this didn't bother us because she was only about a month or so behind her peers. It wasn't until she was about 18 months and was drastically behind her same-aged peers in verbal skills that we noticed there might be something wrong. While her peers were able to carry on simple conversation, make verbal requests, and follow directions, we were happy if Eva would just repeat one word. Still, it didn't bother us TOO much because she did show small signs of improvement...plus she was the only kid her age who could recognize and give the sounds of almost all 26 letters.
At 23 months we started to become more concerned because her peers were engaging in meaningful conversation and Eva wasn't even responding to her name. We signed her up for a mother's day out (MDO) program at our church thinking that getting her around her peers more often would help. After 5 months of MDO and still no improvement we finally came to grips with the possibility that something could be significantly wrong.
Through a couple of connections we were able to be expedited through the wait list at a local early intervention center and her initial evaluation was at 30 months (February 2012). They said the different tests and evaluation systems had her anywhere from 15 to 21 months developmentally, which qualified Eva for their services. At 33 months we also paid to have a full evaluation at Mitchell's Place (local center that specializes in ASD) and our autism suspicion was confirmed.
We received the official ASD diagnosis almost two weeks ago (June 29, 2012) and ever since we have been inundating ourselves with books, articles, blogs, and anything else we can use to educate ourselves on autism. As we continue to learn and try new things we'll update the blog. Please reply with any suggestions!
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