There was always something about Spike. He was gorgeous and super clever but something niggled me. He was a fantastic baby; he fed well, slept well, was content, would play great by himself, was interested in numbers and picked up new information really quickly. For months I took comments on how alert he was as a compliment. I clearly had a little genius in the making and we all think our little crotch goblins are going to be the second coming of Jesus Christ secretly. He was WAY ahead on all of his milestones, building massive towers out of blocks when the milestones said 3-4 blocks and had double the vocabulary. Then at around 16 months the talking stopped, even "Mummy" and "Daddy" and he started talking in scribble. This extended until we went on holiday when he was 22 months and while he was on my shoulders some seagulls flew over us and he pointed at them as said "birds!". YES SPIKEY BIRDS!!! That same holiday we also got "sand", "sea", "beach" and "flag". We have built from there since and whilst he is certainly still a bright boy his speech is quite robotic. He hates chit chat, his conversational skills are best described as ruthlessly efficient.
Socially Spikey has always struggled. He doesn't have any interest in joint activities. I consider myself a bit of an arty farty type and from about the time he could support his own head I had designated the end of the kitchen as The Kid Craft Area. It groaned with poster paints (with the proper lids that the paint brush fits in!), glitter, foam shapes, coloured feathers, coloured lollipop sticks, pom poms, glue sticks, stickers and a myriad other supplies. It is so hard to get him to do any sort of arty activity. Occasionally the mood will take him and it generally always takes a really sensory angle such as hand/finger/face/whole body prints. I have never been able to get him to use a colouring book and he has never had any interest in drawing or writing.
The Nursery has said that he does the same things everyday and has little interaction with the other children, preferring to observe them. On tidying up after the children leave for the day his teacher started noticing little caches of lined up objects hidden around the room; eventually she realised Spike was doing it. He refuses to be touched by his teachers and even hates being touched by me unsuspectingly. He will howl as if in pain or fright from just a hand being placed on his shoulder.
Noises are also a big thing for him. His major hatred is a two-stroke engine like you would find in a petrol lawn mower, hedge strimmer or chainsaw. Quad bikes and motor bikes are also foe. Fair enough you may say, they are loud. But does it really warrant planking on the side of the road to cope with the over stimulus of a chain saw being used 3 miles away half way up the mountain? One time we'd been for a walk down the lane and two quad bikes drove passed us resulting in a melt down of truly biblical proportions. I had to carry him back up the VERY STEEP LANE as he was terrified of more quad bikes coming. This is a kid who would (if you didn't stop him) march up to and jump on the biggest most maddest horse or a growling dog. He'll climb anything, isn't afraid of falling and you have to watch him like a hawk because he'll throw himself off stuff for the fun of it.
Early on it is hard to pin down your niggles as anything legitimate as children all develop so differently and he was my first. It's only really crystallised for me now Spud is getting older and I can compare the two. Ahhh THAT'S what conversational babbling is supposed to sound like. Also, Autism presents so differently from child to child. The spectrum is huge and even children who are diagnosed within the same bracket can exhibit very different behaviours. When you first start bouncing your observations of your child's quirks to other people you'll get a couple of, "No he can't have autism he smiles too much/he can make eye contact/he talks too well". Not entirely unsurprisingly it apparently turns out that your kid doesn't have to act like the understudy in Mercury Rising in order to have autism.
We are very much in the early stages of diagnosis. The teacher is fairly certain and tests are apparently going to happen. Regardless of what diagnosis he gets he's high functioning and in many respects it's a positive thing. If you can capture his interest in a subject it is sooooo easy to get him to take on board the information. He practically teaches himself anything to do with maths/numbers. But there are drawbacks and Mike's obvious one is getting him writing. However, I have some initiatives to hand and will keep you updated on the results.
Ciao Ciao x
