First Post

I hate to bog down Anthony's regular blog with what can be ... not SAD posts, necessarily, but just ... I try and think that Anthony is a child first, not just a child with autism, so I don't want to turn his blog into an autism blog, but I would like to have somewhere to go to talk about Anthony and autism. I'm going to try to go in order of how it all went down, for us, and maybe I'll refer to his other blog? Maybe not. We'll see.

We'll start with pregnancy. I found out I was pregnant with Anthony in October of 2004, three months after I got married. It was a weird set of circumstances, one of my oldest friends died tragically and I had to go home to NJ. I was supposed to be in NJ the weekend after her funeral, for a wedding, so I drove out with my sister and then picked up Mike that Friday at the airport and we went down the shore for my friend Chrissy's wedding. I thought maybe I was pregnant, because I thought I was late, which I never was, but I honestly was so traumatized by my friend Kathy's sudden sickness and death, I didn't know what day it was. I took pregnancy tests in NJ but they were the kind that have pluses and minuses and maybe it's just me but I can't figure that crap out. I was exhausted after the wedding and we flew home on Sunday and went to the drugstore to get skim milk and a pregnancy test (that was the list) and found out I was pregnant that night. I used the test that flashes PREGNANT!, which is my favorite.

Anyway, it was a fine pregnancy, I was 'elderly', meaning I would be over 35 when I delivered. I had some spotting for several weeks, but some women just do, my doctor told me. It was a not-so-great labor and delivery story, involving a late doula, a terrified pregnant lady, a giant headed baby, several doctors checking in and out all day, and finally a c-section at 9:00 on a Friday night. Anthony was a screamer from the beginning, I remember the nurse said to him "What are you so mad about?" right after he was born. He cried and cried and cried and cried. He nursed the HECK out of me, he was a ROUGH nurser. He didn't like me to look at him when he nursed - we used to joke that he was like Tom Cruise with his housekeeper - NO EYE CONTACT! He was colicky and had to be held all the time. He screamed and screamed. It is hard to write about even now. We were so new at everything, we didn't know what to do with him. I finally read my book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which I had bought the night before Anthony was born. I took the things that the author said to do and just did them to the extreme. If it said to swaddle him, I wrapped him up SO TIGHTLY he couldn't move. If it said to say SHHH in his ear, I ran the vacuum and held him right near it. If it said to swing him, I SWUNG him. It seemed to help, he got older, and at around four months he seemed over it. At around six months, I started to sleep train him, to get him out of his swaddle and stop rocking him to sleep. It really worked - we had some long nights, but he started sleeping well and started meeting milestones and all was well. He started sitting up, eating solids, crawling, standing and walking, the regular stuff. He wasn't speaking by the time he was one, he really didn't have any words but I never thought a thing of it. I used to tell people he was the strong but silent type.