So today, when I headed off to work, the kids went with the wife to head down the hill to Kennedy Krieger for yet another research study.
I don’t know, myself, just how many times now that they’ve each taken the ADOS (the “Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule” for those of you not in the know) – I think that the baby’s had it once, perhaps, since he’s minimally verbal as one might expect from a fifteen month old, but the Monster’s easily had it five times now. Continue reading
Because the Monster is a child with Autism, we end up being in a number of research studies.
Some of these studies involve the Monster – they include new tests to see just how his Autism affects him, and tracking to see what he does and doesn’t pick up (and how) in an intellectual sense. Continue reading
One of our biggest concerns when it comes to the Monster getting to something approaching a ‘normal’ life is his ability to use language.
It is, in public, the biggest marker that there’s something different about him. Other children his own age are off conversing about this and that, narrating about their day, and he’s, by comparison, very quiet. Continue reading
All of us have heard the phrase ‘you are what you eat’ at some point in our lives. Mostly, this has been an admonition against eating loads of junk-food, but there is a little bit of credence to the phrase itself on some level.
And of course, as most parents are aware of, kids are a bit less self-regulating on this account. Continue reading
I think most of us in “the same boat” can agree that, as a whole, we don’t know more than we do know about autism. We don’t know what causes it, we don’t know how to “cure” it, and we are still in the phase where we’re trying to figure out how best to treat it.
We’ve known that something was not quite right with the Monster since before his second birthday – as I’ve mentioned previously, that factored into our timing for child #2. One of the factors that went into that timing and decision was weighing the risk of having a second child with developmental delays… and the fact is, there’s not a lot of research into the probabilities of it happening twice. Continue reading