Hi!
When I first started to feel like Dublin would struggle with communication was around 12 months old. He was not yet diagnosed. Autism wasn’t a vocabulary word that we had even considered at this point.
I wonder if my close girlfriends remember me texting “When did your son start talking? What’s your doctor’s take on age appropriateness?” I remember waiting for their responses, pacing in my bathroom, not wanting to cause my husband panic by asking him the same questions that I had already asked outloud during car rides, commericals, and dates.
I racked up most of his lack of babble and talk to him being a boy and to him having parents who do most the talking for him.
But the answers from my friends’ texts and my experience with my eldest daughter’s language acquisition started to weigh on my confidence in the “boy-parent” cause explanation.
Even before his diagnosis, I started breaking my syllables down, hoping that if simplified, he would catch on quicker.
Nearly every single day for the last seven years, I have either jumped in his bed or halted him in the hallway, grabbed his cheeks, pulled his face toward me, made direct eye contact and I’d say “ say hi.”
The first few years, he pushed me away, cocking his head and darting his eye contact in opposite directions. Sensory overload. He’d wriggle out of my grasp, uttering nothing.
The next few years, he’d tolerate my hands, but still utter nothing.
In the last year, he’s tolerated my hands and upon me saying “say hi,” he has been mimicking “say hi” too.
Then in the last three months, he’s tolerated my hands and upon me saying “say hi,” he skipped over the mimicking “say” and says only the “hi.”
Then this morning, he jumped in my bed, grabbed my cheeks, made direct eye contact and said “hi.” Admittedly, I was groggy and didn’t pick up what he was puttin’ down and he grabbed my cheeks, tried to make it more obvious that he was making eye contact and again said “hi.”
He looked nervous. He was biting his lip.
Excuse me for minute. Today, mama is feeling high.