autism diagnosis

Birth & Parenting Series (20): Autism Diagnosis for a Toddler

January 11, 2013

This is our 20th post of guests sharing their birth and/or parenting stories. See the other 19 posts here. They range from homebirth to epidural, homeschooling to bottle feeding. Today’s post is written by Nicole M, mother  of a preschooler who was diagnosed with Autism. It’s not that simple, though, and her journey will be shared in a three part series over the next few Fridays. Read, learn, and appreciate that every child has his or her own path, taking their parents with them. — Early Signs and Seeing His Differences In retrospect, we probably had a lot of signs.  As a baby, he was fascinated by words and labels and would stare at those constantly.  We joked he was going to be a tort lawyer since so many of those words were various warnings on baby products.  Early on, he would make a sound that sounded like “ay, me” a lot.  Also cute.  At one point, he picked up a chant: “good, good, good…” which he would babble by himself.  In a lot of ways he was an insanely easy child: he would play by himself for long periods of time, and didn’t fuss too much about going to bed.  The worst part was the teething, which was monstrously early and often (a family trait) and the ear infections we thought would never clear, that eventually did. As our son became a toddler, we noticed how super smart he was: he knew his alphabet early, was reading everyone’s names…

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