I have 4 children. My daughter is 14, and a truly great child. She is very smart, gifted in fact. She also has talents in music, art and singing. She is very loving and kind, most of the time, after all she is the oldest of 4 and has 3 younger brothers to contend with. So, all in all, I think she does pretty well.
My second child, also my oldest son, is 10. He is very physically strong, and athletic. He likes to race BMX bicycles, play football and baseball. He enjoys most being outside and even enjoys doing hard work, like mowing grass, putting things together, anything physically challenging. Luke struggles in school, not because he isn't smart, but because he finds it boring. I think he struggles with some attention problems and low self esteem.
My fourth child, and yes I know I am going out of order...there is a reason for that and I'll get to it in a minute. My fourth child is 3. He is such a happy guy and also extremely smart, he seems to be the combination of my first two children, very intelligent but also athletic and strong. He loves to watch cartoons, play with cars, trucks....all things boy. He also has been diagnosed with some mild asthma.
Now, for my third child, the middle boy. He just turned 8 and was diagnosed with autism at age 5, finally! I say finally, because we knew for 2 years before that he was autistic, but none of the doctors we took him to locally would listen to us. He was a challenging baby from the start, and by start I mean pregnancy. From worries that I was miscarrying in the first trimester, to heartburn, and extreme feelings of tiredness (even worse than I experienced with his younger brother at a much older age). His movements in the womb were strange, very forceful and many times hurting me. At 36 weeks, some pre-term labor. His labor and delivery was the easiest part of the whole pregnancy, he came quickly with very little pushing.
But, he was unhappy from the beginning, covered in red splotches and white bumps, he was very skinny and long with very poor muscle tone, even for a newborn. He was difficult to soothe, needing constant attention, which in turn caused his then 2yr old older brother to go without attention.
As an infant, he was still challenging...colicky, didn't sleep well, food allergies. He very rarely seemed to content and always hit his milestones on the very low end of normal, just coming in under the radar.
When he was just about 5 weeks old, on New Year's day 2000, I called his primary care doc because he was having great difficulty breathing. I took him to the hospital where he was diagnosed with RSV, typical of premature infants, but yet my son had it. He was in the hospital for a week. From that point on, we battled frequent ear infections, upper respiratory infections, bronchiolitis, just to name a few.....then in February of 2001, he was back in the hospital for another week, this time with chronic vomiting and diarrhea of which we still don't know the cause, but I suspect food allergies. At age 2 he got tubes in his ears, which helped with the ear infections, he only had 2 after that. By now, it was apparent that his behavior up until that point wasn't due to his frequent illnesses, but was something else.
He got evaluated at age 3, he had severe expressive and receptive speech delays, as well as delay in gross and fine motor skills. His attention span was typical for a 3 year old, he did make attempts to explore his world, but he was awkward, bumping and falling down a lot. (I now know that this is because of the assault on his vestibular system from all the ear infections)
I now knew, that this brown-eyed boy had some pretty bad problems. What I didn't know and could not possibly prepare myself for was how this was going to change my life and the life of my family.
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