I am a mother of 3 sons. I became a mother at age 21 to my oldest son Daniel. Daniel is of the "neurological norm". I became a mother again at 22 to my son Timothy. Timothy is an ASD child, for those of you who don't know what ASD means it stands for Autism Spectrum Disorder. I became a mother for a third time at age 28 with my youngest son Connor. Connor is also of the "neurological norm".
Now as I mentioned, Timothy is autistic, he was clinically diagnosed at a year and a half old as Autistic by a local regional center in 2003. At that time, they told my husband and I that he would never be mainstreamed in school, never say I love you, never be able to read or understand what he is reading, never fully acclimate into society and would quite possibly end up in a group home as a teenager or adult. There wasn't much mentioned about a second step after the diagnoses, other than continued in home therapy.
I don't like the word never, especially when it comes to the abilities of children. That doesn't mean that I didn't mourn for the ideas that I had for Timothy, I just didn't stay there for very long. After about a week of mourning the idea that Timothy was going to have an easy life, I decided that "never" was an unacceptable answer about Timothy. He was still receiving in home therapy for speech and occupational therapy, he was communicating his wants and needs with us with PECS ( Picture Exchange Communication System). He didn't really begin to verbally communicate with us until he was 3 years old.
At 3 years old, he started talking, spelling out loud, reading and he potty trained himself. 3 years old is also when the in home therapy ended and he started preschool. The nice thing about the preschool is that it was designed to help mainstream ASD children. Because Timothy was born in January, he started on his third birthday rather than going in the beginning of the next school year. At that time we started him in two preschool settings, one was the center based preschool for ASD children, the other was Head Start Home Base. Because the center preschool is state funded and Head Start Home Base is federally funded, as far as the system was concerned there was no overlap of services.
Timothy spent two and a half years in these programs and flourished. We where all working toward the same goal, to get him to want to socialize and verbally communicate with us. It started out small, one of our first goals was to get Timothy to greet people as they came and left with Hello and Goodbye. It took about 2 months before he understood that saying hello and goodbye is expected in the everyday world we live in. When he started out he would spell hello. We where happy that it was progress. In his center based preschool he was learning about his schedule, and it was a picture schedule based on the PECS cards. We adopted a similar schedule for Timothy's home life, so he could have a sense of continuity, security and structure.
I will continue this story in Part 2. Thanks for reading
