To start the history a bit our son was diagnosed as non-verbal autistic meaning on top of the general autism traits our son also could not talk and so had no method of expressing himself
Three years later he still is unable to talk much, generally a word here or there with some minor exceptions and definitely not sufficient to make any communication by this form possible.
He has over time learned the pecs method of communicating and has also developped other physical methods of getting his point across (ie getting juice from the fridge to tell us he wants a drink)
With the increase in communication and our increase in understanding him he has become far less frustrated and therefore much more open to additional options and lessons
It should be pointed out to parents who have just recently had a child diagnosed with autism that this is not the end of the world by any means. Yes you are going to have to deal with behaviours etc that you would not expect or tolerate out of other children and you have to find constructive ways to try to work around these behaviours however you will find that most autistic children once some form of communication has been established can be extremely happy children.
It also should be noted that with approximately 1 in 100 children are being diagnosed with varying forms of autism so again to those who have children recently diagnosed with autism, you are not alone.
encourage and allow your children to play with various electronic toys (vtech toys worked best for us) as you might be surprised at how well they adapt and this does include various complicated type toys like vsmile and leapster. If your child is hard on toys (rough, possibly throwing and dropping) then you will find the leapster is rugged enough while the vsmile is a bit more fragile.
About this blog
To start i would like to give you a history to our story.
Our son was born on Valentine's Day 2004 (it was going to be either valentines day or friday the 13th and he chose valentines day)
We first noticed his behaviour start to change around his eighteenth month and after watching him for a few days chose to speak to our pediatrician.
Now your choice of pediatrician is vital when it comes to situations like this as you need a pediatrician who will not instantly think you are being hysterical worrywarts.
In our case our pediatrician chose to immediately start setting up tests to see if we were right, no questions, no fuss, right down to lets get to it.
Now the tests did not happen overnight and i believe it took about 6 months for all the results to come back confirming our suspicions.
There is now a number of things that happened. Not all quickly but over time we were set up with three therapists at the hospital.
speech therapist, occupational therapist, and physio therapist were set up over a period of time and we were also introduced to the concept of ABA therapy.
It did take a period of initial hesitation but we eventually chose to enroll our son in the ABA program and between the therapists and ABA we started to see some improvements.
Now as of fall 2009 our son has entered the school system, at the kindergarten level and has lost his access to not only all the therapists but also to the ABA program.
Our luck here is that due to the fact our son is labeled a high flight risk he was assigned full time TA coverage (at no time during the day is he unaccompanied) and now we reach our present point in time
Now while i will attempt to expand on some of the details of this introduction over time, i will also attempt to show his general growth as time goes on
