2 years old and feeling stuck...

My daughter turned 2 in April and that by the summertime she'd been fever-free and well for nearly six months since the massive terrifying meltdown of constant illness we had the previous fall. She still had maybe 8-12 words she used consistently and didn't care to learn any others.

We tried sign language. But she would get angry and refused to learn anything but the sign for 'more'. She liked that one. LOL, I wonder why. We found a speech therapist in the area and started taking her there twice a week. We went all summer and only succeeded in creating more frustration for ourselves and for my daughter.

Typical kids will mimic sounds and words that you say. My daughter never did this. She didn't make animal noises. She didn't want you to read books....but, she would take the books and go look at them alone in her room.

Anytime you tried to get her to repeat something, she would get angry. Imagine that twice a week with a therapist. Everyone once in a blue moon she would be in the mood to try a sound or look at a book with you. But I'm talking like...this maybe happened once a week.

She loved to watch TV. Veggie Tales, Mickey Mouse, etc. She would act out the parts, moving around the room like she was the characters in the movie. Every once in while we'd hear a new word pop out randomly so we let her keep watching them. It became the only time we would hear her interact with anything. She didn't want to talk to us. She also really liked to play on the iPad. At 2 1/2 she was perfectly capable of switching in and out of her own games and would play by herself giggling and laughing for hours on end. I didn't know what to do. She was happier with a TV show or the iPad than she ever was with me. So for a long time I just let it be and I became more and more depressed.

At this time my mother started bringing up the idea that maybe she was autistic. Or had developmental delays. Sensory issues. Something??? She read book after book after book and for a while I was really angry and I didn't listen. There was nothing wrong with my kid. She just couldn't TALK. That didn't make her autistic, ADD, ADHD, Aspergers, etc. It was really difficult for me and my husband both to get to the point where we did acknowledge that our daughter needed something more. During this time I also made talked with some awesome moms online who shared their journey with their special needs kids. It made all the difference in the world to me. I'm not saying it was EASY! Hell no. I had nightmares of never seeing her succeed at school, of her living with us for the rest of her life, never getting married, never having a family of her own. I was so terrified. I'll be honest, from time to time those feelings, doubts, and worries do come back.

Anyway, back to the speech therapist...
She made very little progress with our daughter and I ultimately ended the sessions due to mine and my daughter's frustration. Nothing she was doing in the sessions was anything we weren't doing at home to try and encourage her to speak and copy ANYTHING we said. The money needed to be spent elsewhere.

So moving on...
We found an autism specialist doctor and made an appointment that August. It cost and arm and a leg because it wasn't covered by insurance, but it was still worth it because it put us on the right path to helping our daughter. Within 10-15 min of seeing her, he told us she was on the spectrum. NOTE, he did not say where on the spectrum and he said not to worry about where she was right now. (meaning it didn't matter if she was ADD, ADHD, Autistic, Aspergers, Processing, Sensory, etc.) All treatment was the same for any color of the spectrum rainbow.

Wow! So that was news to us. We had no idea at the time that all these disorders were linked together. His first and foremost rule was diet change. Children on the spectrum are super sensitive to things that typical kids/people can overcome without much trouble.

1. Gluten

2. Dairy

3. Chemical Preservatives and Additives

That's all for now. I'll get into how we started the change and what we saw change in our daughter next time.

XOXO

Krystal

Where it all started...

Letting it all hang out.

If you only knew.

LOL, if you've dealt with fertility issues. You are part of the club and you know what I mean when I say 'Letting it all hang out :-) My husband to this day complains that I have no modesty left. I simply say, "everyone's seen everything already, who cares?" Let's be honest. Once you've done the whole fertility testing, dozens of invasive internal sonograms with dozen of medical students all peering up your whoohoo AND pushing a child out of your vajayjay with a room full of people watching. Your viewpoint changes a little.

I giggle when hubby locks the door to go to the bathroom. Me...I have an audience. Daughter...Dogs... There's no such thing as privacy for a mom. If I try, these strange whining sounds start coming from the hound dog on the other side of the door and then alien fingers come crawling under the door with a little voice that whispers "Whatcha doing?"

My husband and I, like many couples, struggled with fertility for years before being blessed with a darling baby girl. She struggled with jaundice for several weeks after birth. We did the lamp at the hospital, the lamp at home. We cooked that poor little baby girl until she was radioactive. Well, as a new mom, I was slightly concerned by the glow light that had to be wrapped into her blanket 24hrs a day, LOL. Finally, the doc said we could stop and I focused on the next problem.

Nursing.

To this day my boobs hurt when I even think about it. I struggled with being unable to nurse her. I took herbs, I worked with the Le Leche coaches, I pumped. I nursed and pumped and nursed again. Nada. Nothing. Only a dribble of milk. At two months she was still losing weight and we switched her to formula.

2 Months old...

My little baby girl who cried constantly, changed overnight into a happy content child who never had a care in the world. Slept through the night at two months old and shot off the growth charts like a launched missile.

We went about our lives. We'd already decided to slow down the immunization process, something my pediatrician hated, but I pretty much told him "bite me". I knew kids usually ran fevers after having shots and could have flu-like symptoms, but my baby would be feverish and sick for weeks after each appointment. I knew it wasn't right, but the doctor just kept telling me how horrible it would be for her not to have these shots, so we kept marching along. I spread them out and my poor darling daughter was sick for weeks, sometimes two months after each appointment.

In the meantime we noticed she was a little later than average for learning to sit up. She never really crawled. And she never babbled. She would squeal and laugh when she was happy or cry and scream when she was unhappy. But there was really no exploration of language and sounds at all.

9-12 months old...

She would look at toys and stare at them and play a little. But she was removed from the world around her. She rarely held eye contact and was not affectionate.

When she was 18 months old she had another round of shots and a half dose of a flu shot. I have no idea why I let that doctor talk me into a flu shot. It had to have been a bad day. Maybe I was on my period. I don't know, but I regret it still to this day. After that round my daughter's immune system completely collapsed. She was sick with one strange virus after another, fevers spiked to 104, 105, we were in and out of the ER for 4-5 months. I was terrified.

She hasn't had another shot since. Sorry. You can bitch and moan all you want that I'm one of "those" people. I don't give a shit. If you went through what I did, you wouldn't let your kid have another shot either. When she's older and her body is more developed and her immune system is more established (like a teenager) she can have her shots.

During the time that she was so ill, there was no development at all. No language progression. No social skills. She continued to exist and play in a plane outside of the rest of us. She didn't respond to her name when called. She had virtually no words. She didn't make sounds other than laughing or crying. And she still had trouble making any eye contact whatsoever.

2 years old...

But she was a content toddler. She would sit and play with her toys, stare out the window, watch tv and laugh at cartoons. It was easy to say "she'll just grow out of it" or "she's just a late bloomer".

That's what we kept telling ourselves after she was finally well and fever-free going on about six months. She had a few words -Cup, Eat, More, No. She would clap for 'yes' but couldn't say it. Or wouldn't. She still didn't answer to her name consistently. And we continued to be suspicious that she had hearing problems. She had started to make other sounds, but it was gibberish and thanks to the popular movie Despicable Me, I coined her strange garble "minion talk".

At two and a half we started looking for answers. I'll get into that in the next post.

XOXO
Krystal