An autism diagnoses

This wasn’t a surprise, I’ve suspected it since he was around 2.  He didn’t talk right away, in fact we started baby sign language with him to help him communicate and then he started speaking after that.  He also started a “hand thing” as he has come to call it, right before he was two.  He gets his hands up by his face and kinda twists them, it’s hard to explain.  I took a video of it and showed his pediatrician who assured me it was not seizures bc we could stop him, it wasn’t tics, it wasn’t a few other things and reasons why but I don’t remember it all but he also said bc Keegan is loving and engages with his family it wasn’t autism.  That made me feel better for a time but also made me leery of seeking another opinion too.  However, as he got older and research changed, I wondered more and more.  Once when he was three or four, we were in Walmart, We had ate at the subway there and I went to get what we needed while Glenn stayed with some of the kids while they finished eating.  He told me a lady had been watching Keegan and asked about him bc she was a special ed teacher at a local school and noticed his “hand thing”.  This made me wonder all over again.  Over the years I’ve kept noticing things, all seemingly small but all different from the other kids and all put together really makes a difference.  Now, I’ll pause here to add, I love my Keegan!  He is my rainbow baby (baby born after a miscarriage), a fact he really enjoys knowing!  I’m not looking to change him, seeking a diagnoses was about seeking answers and help in the areas he needs extra help to guide him to be the best possible Keegan he can be.  My goal with all my babies is to enable them to be productive members of society.  Back to those small things we would notice, he had a very slight reaction to a vaccine around 9 months, nothing I could really document, or nothing ER worthy, he was still responsive but just didn’t seem himself for around 24 hrs.  It was a vaccine none of the others had bc they weren’t giving it when the older ones were born.  I do not believe this caused his autism but rather the autism possibly caused the reaction.  But this is not a vax debate blog so I will move along.  If people are interested in my vax journey, I may blog about that at a diff time, it might be an interesting story to some, lol.  Sometimes while doing his “hand thing” he would walk in circles and be loud, like we couldn’t watch TV if he was living room bc he would get so loud!  This was hard bc we wanted to let him be who he was but it was disruptive to the others and we all have to learn to live together, but he would get frustrated if he was asked to go to the other room (this wasn’t a new thing for any of them, if we wanted to watch a family movie but someone wanted to play instead, they were asked to play in their room) bc he wanted to be with the family and that pulled on my heart!  But once he was talking good, if you sat and listened, he was telling stories.  On the topic of movies, another thing I noticed is he seemed to need the case to a movie to really stay engaged in it.  Somehow it helped him relate to the movie, I guess.  I assume it was a concrete object to help him understand the more abstract?  He seems to have outgrown that now.  We also noticed some lack of control at times and he would get angry which has escalated some as he has gotten older, hence the knowing he needs some extra help to learn to control it.  There was also this seemingly compulsion to smell his daddy’s coffee, everyday!  Occasionally he is bothered by loud noises.  However, most people are shocked when I mention possible autism and now when we tell of his new diagnoses that has confirmed what we were seeing and suspected bc he hides it in public most of the time.  Also another reason I was confused if we should seek a diagnoses.  What confirmed it for me was I had taken a recent video of Keegan doing his “hand thing” and when Kayson was in rehab, he saw a neuropsychologist everyday so one day I asked if she would be willing to look at the video and what her opinion was and she said, “get that baby evaluated, he is high functioning autistic and they get missed too much bc they can hide it!”  That was all I needed to hear.  And he does hide it, at church in children’s worship, they have noticed he walks circles sometimes but have never seen him do his hands and upon further discussion, our children’s director realized he always puts his hands in his pockets while walking his circles.  So he has learned to not show that but we never told him to do that.  School also doesn’t see it.  Another thing was once he was talking, he would always say, “me, Keegan”  I loved this.  He is also very literal in his speech sometimes, the entry to our house is “the shoe way”, a stapler was a “pincher”, his pacifier was his “mouth”.  I bet people wonder at us bc this one has stuck and we still call pacifiers “mouths”, lol!  So now we have a diagnoses, we have some answers, we have a place to start for help.  His evaluating psychologist suggest he gets speech therapy and OT and counseling with someone experienced working with autism, that we join a parent support group and seek help in learning how to help him and discipline him.  That we seek assistance through the school bc he says it’s just a matter of time before they see certain behaviors.  So now we are on this journey too.  Our Keegan does bring so much joy to us.  We do covet prayers through this time and for him as we all adjust to the reality of a diagnoses.  It’s weird bc it changes nothing but it also changes everything!