Now, where was I? Oh...first there were two then there was three and then four... So, when I was growing up I always wanted to be at home with my kids (not working outside of the home)...driving a yuppie car, volunteering at church...maybe take golf or tennis lessons. Well, for the first 3 years after Alex was diagnosed it wasn't all that fun. There wasn't (and still isn't) a yuppie car, not much volunteering and I still don't know how to play tennis or golf! Most of this is because we didn't have the $$ for extra things like tennis and golf or the yuppie car. We quickly found out that health insurance that we pay almost $400 a month for doesn't consider Autism to be a "medical" issue. They consider it "developmental". So, once we finally got him diagnosed and set on our way to find services/therapies or him...boy did we find out that we would spend a lot of $$ on that child!

Sorry, I need to back up. How did we come to the diagnosis? Alex was our first child so we didn't really have a benchmark to go by for developmental milestones. Although I still believe that if Simone was our first child people would have said that we couldn't compared him to her because she's a girl. In fact we heard that a lot..."he's a boy" Einstein didn't talk until 3".... Anyway, our neighbor is a special ed intervention specialist/special ed teacher and she was the one to first mention something to me. Now that was extremely hard for her and for me. I still don't know when she first noticed something was wrong with Alex but when she did finally say something to me she knew it would end our friendship or at least stress it greatly. And stress it it did!! It took us about a year but we finally got back to each other.

Okay, so she tells me she thinks there is something wrong with Alex. Oh no she didn't just say that there was something with wrong with my child!!! We did the "right" thing and went to our pediatrician and wouldn't you know he said he didn't think there was a problem and that she was just a nosey neighbor. Great...that's what we wanted to hear. Then, since I worked at the Y and Alex had been in their childcare when I worked teaching classes since he as a baby they knew him well. One of their workers was going to college for special ed and said that she thought Alex wasn't responding to them and that he may have a hearing problem. Okay, back to the doctor we went. He still didn't think anything was wrong with Alex - "he isn't in the corner rocking so he isn't Autistis but I'll go ahead and order some hearing/speech tests since this is now not a nosey family member/neighbor questioning but someone else questioning his development". Needless to say he was WAY OFF!!! We later found out he didn't believe in the "spectrum" of Autism. The worst is that he to this day is missing diagnosing children. We have friends that see him and their child was in 2nd grade before they got a diagnosis....same doctor!!!! He should have his license taken away!!!!!!!

As we headed to the testing, we still thought that he was okay but boy was that first hearing/speech test an eye opener. He didn't do too well in the hearing test (very distracted/meltdown) and when we met with the speech therapist, all his "autistic traits" showed. I remember being in this small room where there was a clock and he started watching the second hand go around the clock and saying the number when it reached it...1...2....3...4.... Then she pulled out bubbles and he was so amazed and his hands flapped like he was going to take off. This is where we heard for the first time (from a professional) that our son had "red flags" for Autism.

Our next step was a sedated hearing test to rule out hearing problems. Boy that was fun...NOT! I can't even write about that!

The next step was trying to get into an autism specialist (developmental pediatrician). More on that process next.....