It's official
It's been a few days since the doctors spent an hour explaining their findings over the past three months when testing and observing our youngest.
We knew there'd be something. We expected him to be on the spectrum.
Still, it was a shock to hear that he had infantile autism. We expected high functioning autism, or perhaps atypical autism.
From our (stereotypical) point of view, infantile autists were those with little or no language, or at least late to learn to communicate verbally. (We know better now).
Arthur was a very quick study and spoke sentences of five words at two-years-old. His vocabulary has been deemed extensive for his age at the pre-school.
Not only did he speak at an early age, he was interested in letters and numbers.
Six months ago, he probably could have counted to 100 if he had had the patience to stick with it. He started counting at random numbers and stopped when he found something better to do.
He'd recognize most of the capital letters in the alphabet when we pointed at one and asked him.
So the biggest surprise - and hurt - for us, was that the doctors found him intellectually inferior, advising us to treat him as a three-year-old instead of a five-year-old.
Here's a kid who can tell you how to stop an oil fire and the names of the three bones in the middle ear (though not in Latin).
I don't know what's worst; that they see him that way or that it does make sense in many areas, though I know there's more to him than their tests show.
We knew there'd be something. We expected him to be on the spectrum.
Still, it was a shock to hear that he had infantile autism. We expected high functioning autism, or perhaps atypical autism.
From our (stereotypical) point of view, infantile autists were those with little or no language, or at least late to learn to communicate verbally. (We know better now).
Arthur was a very quick study and spoke sentences of five words at two-years-old. His vocabulary has been deemed extensive for his age at the pre-school.
Not only did he speak at an early age, he was interested in letters and numbers.
Six months ago, he probably could have counted to 100 if he had had the patience to stick with it. He started counting at random numbers and stopped when he found something better to do.
He'd recognize most of the capital letters in the alphabet when we pointed at one and asked him.
So the biggest surprise - and hurt - for us, was that the doctors found him intellectually inferior, advising us to treat him as a three-year-old instead of a five-year-old.
Here's a kid who can tell you how to stop an oil fire and the names of the three bones in the middle ear (though not in Latin).
I don't know what's worst; that they see him that way or that it does make sense in many areas, though I know there's more to him than their tests show.
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