and the journey began...

The longest document on my computer is the journal that I started soon after the specialists from Allegany County Infants and Toddlers Program told us that they were 98% sure that Ben had a form of autism: PDDnos, a wierd abbreviation for Pervasive Developmental Delay not otherwise specified. It begins something like, "A bombshell hit our family...", and it was an emotionally devistating explosion. Our sweet little boy, we were told, was going to need lots of extra help. But since he was talking even a little, they felt confident that with early intervention, ie; special teachers coming to our house, speech therapy, and even a special preschool, he would slowly gain more typical speech.

Ben had seemed a typical baby. He smiled, seemed happy. It wasn't until he was passing the point at which we figured he should be babbling, trying to say words, that we started to suspect. At 18 months, he wasn't talking. By the time he was almost 2, he didn't look when we called him by name. He didn't come show us things, reach for things, try to communicate much at all. Ben had a particularly funny habit of lining up small objects along the edge of the coffee table, and then moving each one an inch or so forward, one by one, like they were in a parade. Once they had all advanced, he got down eye level with the table to make sure they were all perfectly in line.  I had never seen that in a child: and I was a trained preschool teacher!
We had his hearing tested, as best we could since he was not cooperative or even verbal. The specialist felt his hearing was fine. At last, I took him to have the Infants and Toddlers ladies look at him. They were in the building where my girls went to school. They watched him in thier office, asked questions, came to my house to observe and even made another appointment for a school psychologist to observe him....That's when they ever so gently gave thier opinion...

Research! That's what I advise, because that's what we did first. Internet searching, asking questions, making contacts were the activities that kept our minds occupied until we could get our world back to some order. The more we knew about why he acted the way he did and what was being tried to  help others, the better we could help him and help others understand.
 We had two other children, our lovely, bright girls. How would we do what needed to be done for Ben without denying Erin and Elizabeth all the things we thought they needed and we wanted to give them.

Pray! At first the  prayer was a reactive, "How, God? Why? What do we do?"  And He didn't answer all those questions, but He didn't punish us for asking. He had already put in place many friends and family members who became supporters and cheerleaders for us. He also sent us along the way many compassionate and passionate teachers and specialists. Oh, there were the teachers who couldn't see why they should be bothered to try to understand Ben's outbursts. And every year we had to "retrain" a new teacher or new batch of teachers and administrators. But, every year he grew,learning and talking more.