A.'s Story

A's Story

My husband and I have been raising our grandson since he was two days
old. He is the joy of our life. A. will be 5 years old on Feb 22 and life has
been very interesting through the years. He was not diagnosed until he was
3 years old.

I can remember the first time I changed his diaper how he screamed. He
acted like it hurt him. He did this with every diaper change. When he was
6 months old I started feeding him baby food. I would start out with a
vegetable and try to end with a fruit. He would scream when I changed from
one to the other. He liked them both but did not want me changing the taste
on him.

When he was 20 months old he started lining up his cars and stuff. This is
when I first suspected he had autism. He never talked until he was 2.6
you but he could tell you every letter in the alphabet. We started Speech
Therapy when he was 2 years old. When he turned 3 years old his speech
started emerging and he is very verbal now. I have to laugh every time
I think about the time he learned the difference between the words big
and little. We were at Walmart and he pointed at a very large lady and said
"that's a big one".

He still tries to do this sometimes. We have to be very careful about what
he hears and who he plays with. He will imitate other kids behaviors and
repeat words that they say. Right now we are trying to replace the word
"stupid" with the word "silly". He picked this up from the movie Charlie
Brown.

Our biggest battle right now is trying to find ways to help him with man-
aging his anger. He gets mad and he wants to hit. There is a lot of humor
in the way A. reacts to things and say's things. We have our bad days but
on most days we find we laugh a lot and learn a lot together.

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