So as I said, he was not saying any words by the time he was one. He started to say words in his second year, but he really didn't string any together. He never, Mike noted, said "airplane" when he heard one flying overhead. We knew he could hear well because even if you whispered "cookie" from three miles away, he could hear and wanted one. We loved Signing Time, and he signed a lot. By the time he was 16-18 months old, he knew his alphabet and letters and he could count to ten. He also knew colors, all animals, basically everything covered in Signing Time songs. I'd say we began to notice differences in him and other kids, real differences when he was about 18 months old. I asked his doctor about it when he was 18 months old, because we noticed that he didn't respond to any requests. One night when my sister was over, we were trying to get him to hand us a bag of chips and he was getting really upset because he could NOT seem to do it. I talked to his doctor about it and he said that he was clearly smart and he wasn't worried. He said "keep reading to him and keep talking to him". He also said we could go to playgroups and open gyms but that I shouldn't expect him to play with other kids. I remember thinking that was good, because he really didn't play with others. He had sensory issues, looking back, but I certainly didn't realize it then. He loved to be upside down, he looked at the tv peripherally, and he was a real daredevil - he climbed on EVERYTHING. He broken the drawers in his dresser, because he'd pull them out to climb on them to get to the top of his dresser. I moved him to a toddler bed when he was around two and naps became a little crazy. I'd leave him in his room (we had a hook and eye lock on the door) for an hour and I'd find him up on his dresser more than half the time. One day he was mad about taking a nap and he pulled his closet doors off the hinges. We started taking things out of his room, and I joked that it looked like a prison cell, but it really did!
When he was 21 months old, he broke his foot in his crib. I went out to see a play and when I called at intermission, Mike said that Anthony had been crying a lot, which was unusual. Mike kept going up and checking on him but he kept crying. By the time I got home, he was sleeping. The next morning, he was kind of limping, but still tearing around. When Mike changed his diaper he noticed that his foot was swollen. But we never thought anything was wrong because he limped, but he didn't stop, he never even slowed down. Finally, we called the doctor and the triage nurse recommended that we take him to the local children's hospital ER, so we did. I remember we had to wait FOREVER for an x-ray and I almost just took him home, I was so convinced that he hadn't done anything. I was super embarassed when it turned out his foot was broken, of course. We figured he had done it on his crib and we moved him to a toddler bed right after that. This was another sign that I didn't know about - his threshold for pain was very high - he never cried teething, he never minded when I wiped his nose, in fact it seemed the rougher the better. Now that I have Maria and Veronica, I can tell that teething seems to bug typical children!
He also lined things up. I never thought one thing of it. Ugh. This makes me feel so stupid, to write all this stuff down. HOW could we not have seen it? WHY didn't I push the doctor to give me a referral for early intervention? It's getting depressing in here...
...which I hate, because we really did have fun. He has always been a joyful person, he is a positive person. Now that there are so many kids around, I think back so often on when it was just me and Anthony. There is no point, I suppose, in worrying about why I didn't know he had autism, I just didn't. Now we do.
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