by Tim on February 22, 2009
This is Part 2 of our series “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now?”, a journey through what’s happening these days in the life of our autistic 3 1/2-year-old son and sequel to our very popular original article, “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?”.
Note: Wherever you see “DSM-IV” below, this means that attribute is part of the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition or DSM-IV. In medical terms, a specific combination of those DSM-IV criteria is what brings about a diagnosis of autism.
Same obvious disclaimer as before: We are not advising you on how to evaluate your child. Go get them evaluated by professionals with extensive experience with autism. Don’t just rely on some random people on the Internet – namely, people like us.
If you haven’t already, go back and read Part 1. If you have, let’s continue on!
Characteristics That Are Significantly Present (continued)
Difficulty with social awareness (a bit better but a lot to work on) – I don’t know whether this has an official meaning, but I think of social awareness in a very broad sense as being aware that there are people around you and that they can be engaged with at some interpersonal level. For some time, we referred to other kids in the room as ‘part of the furniture’ as our son didn’t interact with them much differently than any other object in the room.
School has helped him in this regard in that he has regular time every school day with the same children and is involved in activities with them on an ongoing basis. You still get the sense that he’d usually be content without them, but often the emotions of an autistic toddler are inscrutable.
He does enjoy watching other kids do funny things, but watching rather than playing with children is one of those possible signs of autism, and this is a fairly accurate description of where he is right now.
That said, it is nice to see that he’s aware that other people have names, and he can use a name to refer to a person, though usually now that’s only with some prompting.
Continue on with Part 3! [click to continue…]
by Tim on February 20, 2009
Many times over, our “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?” post is the most read article on this site. It’s also the post people most often cite as the reason why they write us and become regular readers of our blog. We are gratified by your response to our story about our son and hope all this has been helpful to you and your family.
In celebration of the 1st Anniversary of our blog, I decided to write a multi-part series, revisit that popular post, and update it for what the J-Man is doing now almost 9 months later. The original “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?” gave you a snapshot of what an autistic toddler might be like – or at least what ours was like – about three months before his 3rd birthday.
[click to continue…]
“Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.” — Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Sorry to be light on posting the last few days. We’ve all been feeling under it this week. I’m also working on a few improvements to the blog, which I’ll hopefully get done this weekend along with some posting.
In the meantime, here’s another achievement to celebrate! Even though J-Man has felt bad all week, had all sorts of weird sleep patterns, and has decided that this would be a nice time to assume the role of terrible-almost-threes-tantrum-monster, we did have a big positive. He decided to color!!
To make a long back story short, he has never enjoyed using crayons because of his sensory issues and fine motor control problems. It seems like he can’t figure out how to use the crayon, it somehow feels icky in his hand, or both. He tends to hold slender objects (like spoons, crayons, pens, etc.) at the very end with as little finger skin as he can get away with. (see first picture below) This obviously makes it very hard for him to self-feed from a spoon.
I had him ’sign’ a birthday card for my sister the other day with a crayon. Usually if we get a couple of dots and a random line, we’re happy. Even that takes a lot of effort usually. This time, he kept running the crayon back and forth and I had to take it from him so she could still read the card.
Night before last, he took one of his bathtub crayons (easy clean-up!) – very specifically the green one – and colored the edge of the tub for a good ten minutes. He has NEVER done this. He even held it some of the time in a ‘normal’ writing grasp (see second picture). Woo hoo!
After a couple of years of occupational therapy, we have coloring! On the one hand, I guess that could be depressing. But every victory is hard fought, and you gladly take every one of them regardless of cost. As you can tell in the last picture, he’s so proud of himself. That makes EVERYTHING worth it.
In one of those make-my-day moments, during speech therapy J-Man actually fed a bear with an empty spoon after ‘dipping’ the spoon in an empty bowl. So nothing in the bowl or on the spoon, and – shocking newsflash – stuffed bears don’t eat! It’s an abstract, non-literal event! And this is a kid with all manner of feeding issues who is distrustful of most all things culinary. But with some encouragement and direction, he figured out he could pretend to feed the bear without there needing to be literal feeding going on, and he thought it was fun!
If there was one part of the autism evaluation that he basically scored close to zero on, it was pretend play.
He’s never done this before. So….
We now interrupt this news flash for a freak out.
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!
W00t! Huzzah! Yay!
We now return you to our regular programming.
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Today’s new conversation:
“Who’s the man?”
“I-I muh-muh!” (I’m the man!)
The little bits of grace that sneak up on you. The little cures for what ails ya.
Took this one this morning during the walking around part of his breakfast.
Say Cheese Toast!
God, he looks more and more like Mary.
The J-man is having one of those days. OK, maybe one of those weeks. He does brilliantly at some things (see also: the typing thing!), and then completely loses it with others (see also: speech therapy today. Whew!). I don’t know if he’s still just off his game from being at the grandparents for the weekend, or if he’s going through a growth spurt or some kind of developmental spurt, or what, but it’s been WILD in the old Flashlight house lately.
First off, little man isn’t sleeping a whole lot. He is spending more and more time kicking the side of the crib instead of sleeping. Second, he’s not listening to directions as well – yes, I know we’re talking about a 2-year-old, but there were still things he would respond to. His eating has been pickier than ever – although cheese toast is still a huge hit, the nuggets aren’t as awesome as they used to be. And, the shirt chewing is back. He essentially is a big ball of stress.
On the plus side though, he knows WAY more of the alphabet than we thought. When we sing it to him, he says, or tries to say, many of the letters, and is learning to recognize them on the keyboard, or in his ABC board books, as well. Go little man! He is pointing to and recognizing more pictures in the book Tim reads him every night at bathtime, and there is nothing so cool as watching your kid point out ALL the flowers on the page when asked where the flowers are – especially when we had only previously pointed out the flowers in the ground that Tigger is watering, not the ones Pooh is holding, or the ones by the fence, or the one that Eeyore is admiring.
He’s also really working on saying “I love you” which will just melt your heart. He’s working hard on climbing and going down steps, and is able to do it holding onto the rail and someone’s hand – occasionally taking “big boy steps” which I don’t think we’ve consciously tried to get him to do yet.
Hopefully, we’ll settle back down soon, since he has a hearing test next week, then (dun dun duuun!) the dentist the week after. Can’t wait.
