Planet N - The Early Years

In the next few blog entries I will be talking about life on Planet N – starting with his early years and moving towards the present day.

  

When N was born he was the perfect baby.  He fed straight away, unlike No 1 son, AJ who refused point blank!  N was soon sleeping through the night and he was happy and content – he would chuckle away to himself in his seat. 

However, at a year old my mother noticed that he didn’t respond to his name.  She asked if he was deaf, but as I knew that he responded to sounds behind him there was nothing wrong with his hearing.  It soon became apparent that he had autism.

My eldest was a nightmare.  He didn’t sleep through until he was three. He was into everything and would touch anything he could.  There was just 18 months between the two and N idolised him and copied everything he did.  When we went out, one would run one way and the other would go in the opposite direction. Who should I chase? 

It got to the point that we were chucked out of every toddler group in Bracknell, apart from one – which was at our local church. 

I tried getting help from the local health visitor, but because both boys were very intelligent, she snapped that there was nothing wrong with them and I was just a crap mother.  I heard that a lot. One day, I went to the health centre in floods of tears.  I hadn't slept for weeks because of AJ and I needed help.  My health visitor's exact words were: "Pull yourself together woman, you're making a fool of yourself"  Not what I wanted to hear!

At around 2 years old, N developed obsessions.  Thomas The Tank Engine and the colour blue were the main ones.  Even now, 20 years on, he favours blue.  However, he hated the Thomas videos. He loved the books with stills from the video series, he loved the audio tapes narrated by Ringo Starr – but he would run from the room when AJ watched the videos.  

One day he refused to come downstairs for his lunch if the telly was on.  This went on for weeks.  We just couldn’t understand it.  After a long process of elimination, we discovered that he had once come down when an advert for a new Thomas video was on, and so he didn’t want to risk seeing it again.  Well, although it’s often the easy route to give into an autistic child, it is important to me that they learn to fit in around the family, and not for the family to fit in around them.  So we managed to persuade him that we would only watch the BBC when he was downstairs, and there are no ads on that.  Phew!!  That worked!

Getting him to wear anything other than blue or to eat off plates which were not blue or Thomas ones was another matter! But it was a compromise which we could make.  You have to have give and take with an autie and know which battles are worth fighting.