It’s been a long and very stressful week here at Lizzie’s Home. I’m physically and emotionally exhausted, and I’m ready for a bit of fun, thankyouverymuch :)
My darling boy, Master J, turns ‘double digits’ on Saturday. How can I be the mother of a ten year old? Oh, that’s right - Nineteen Year Old Lizzie remembers. The twenty-eight hour posterior labour. The conehead (his, not mine). The resulting agony when peeing. Those things are seared into my brain forever.
J has gone through more than the average ten year old to get to where he is now. The autism has been both a blessing and (I’m afraid to say), a curse at times. But it’s funny - all those tears and heartache in the early years were eventually replaced with real, honest-to-God, amazing achievements. I don’t remember every single nappy I changed (of many thousands) but I remember the day he first peed in the potty (he was almost 6. It happens people). I don’t remember specific nights of wakefulness, but I remember (more often than I can count) tucking him in as I went to bed, marvelling at the difference in composure he has when he’s asleep. And it’s not just the usual joke about children being devils when they’re awake and angels when they sleep, LOL. There’s a peace about him that generally isn’t present during the day. His overworked, overstimulated brain gets a chance to go to ’standby’ for a change.
I remember my fair share of bad times, don’t get me wrong. There was a period of about two years, right after he was diagnosed (at 3 ½)where his frustrations over lack of verbal communication mixed with a misunderstanding of normal social cues resulted in some really tricky moments. I cried alot those two years. But it got better.
This child of mine spoke his first word at 2 ½. At age three, at his first autism assessment, he had just a dozen words. At 3 ½ (eventual diagnosis), a mere 50. Take your typical, normally-developing three-and-a-half year old. Imagine packing all the wonder in those little eyes into fifty words. Try doing it yourself. How frustrating it must have been! And yet somehow, sometime during the year he was three, J taught himself to sight-read. My mind still boggles at this. His expressive communication was far, far below his peers. His internal comprehension, we were to find out, was not. You might wonder how we were able to determine he could read when he had such a limited vocabulary. Well, at first we thought his repeated words were echolalia, taken from our repeated readings of his favourite books. Then we started noticing him looking at newspapers, cereal boxes, street signs in neighbourhoods we’d never been to - and pointing and repeating the word. So we began to test him. We wrote out his favourite stories in our own handwriting and he could read the words, even when we deliberately put them out of order. And it just snowballed from there. He developed what would later become a favourite activity - a love for game shows. The first of these was, funnily enough, Wheel of Fortune, from which he actually learned the beginnings of spelling. Of course, with all this reading came more and more words and his vocabulary shot ahead. By the end of his kindergarten year (kindy is age 4 here…preschool everywhere else?) he had a good level of verbal communication, considering his earlier limitations. He could read a set of instructions and do them, even if the sentence was not read out aloud to him or he didn’t speak the words aloud himself.
J improved steadily from there. At his ‘big school’ entry examination with an Education Department psychologist (standard procedure in my state for special needs kids - it helps determine the best schooling option for them) J scored in the FIRST PERCENTILE for everything. Every single thing. In certain areas, his development was stated to be as low as a 14 month old child (he was then nearly 5). We chose not to put him in a separate special school but to ’shelter educate’ him in a small special ed classroom (max somewhere around 10-12 students, with one full time teacher and one SSO, so the student/teacher ratio was 1:5 or 1:6) within a mainstream school. He’s been in this situation for the last five years, and has thrived. He gets the extra attention he needs during lesson time but interacts socially with the other kids at recess. As you might have read a few days ago, his class went on a school camp with two other (regular) classrooms. I love this arrangement.
And in the years that he’s been in this environment, we’ve been incredibly grateful to discover that not only has he (so far) avoided the more common ‘piggyback conditions’ with his autism (mutism, epilepsy, intellectual disability - the last of which ¾ of autism spectrum kids are said to suffer, from very mild to severe - and the list goes on) but he has been deemed high-functioning autistic with talents in maths and reading well above his year level. How lucky are we?
As a nineteen year old new mother, I thought I knew everything. I knew nothing, LOL. Ten years in real time has aged me more like twenty (:P) but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
I mean, how many parents get to witness multiple miracles?
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