DS was: (birth to age 2 approx.)
- a bad sleeper from birth, he had real difficulties to find sleep, we were lucky if he slept by 10pm. (Better now he has no daytime nap.)
-he was fascinated with the ceiling fan, and lights and buttons from phones, tv remotes,...he stared at them for ages.
-he was fussy when starting solids, took agessss to get used to lumpy foods, still is trouble at mealtime with chewing,...
-ds was very wary of strangers early on.
-terrified of loud noises and loud or highpitched voices.
-he would often hit his matress full force with his legs when awake (from around 9m). He kept that up for months.
-attention span for TV was so longggg, he was completely mesmerized by tv. Still is...
-cannot recall if ds ever pointed at things in his first year, but knows he wasn't pointing at age 18m, so we started teaching him, showing him how to point for things he wanted.
-ds took our hand and used our hand to point instead of his.
-ds took ages to learn to wave bye, and didn't copy us for nursery rhymes for instance. But he looked at us and giggled.
-from age 16 m, he'd gather shoes, tv remotes, dvds and cds, toys and would line them up or stack them, move one or two and place it back. He played like this for hours every day, but used some of his bigger toys like rocking horse appropriately.
A few months later he also used to kneel in front of his buggy and play with the straps for ages and started to play with doors open/close (still does)
-ds would need to be called many times or touched or he would not "hear" us , we laughed about his selective hearing att!
-ds did not understand/notice very simple sentences and instructions.
-lots and lots of unexplained tantrums, always overly emotional reactions across the whole range from sad to happy.
-his babbling was basic and limited, not many different sounds .
-ds mumbled "mama" but not meaningly addressed to me until near 18m.
-play always limited, especially pretend play, quickly became obssessed with cars and trains (he did flick their wheels too a fair bit), he played alone and never wanted us to entertain him.
- DS was almost non-verbal at age 2 with only a few unclear words.
he did manage to copy SALT at feeding a teddy after being shown several times for his initial salt assessment at age 2, so salt ruled out asd on the ground that he managed to copy her and that he was giving some eye contact.
Sorry it's a long post...and well done if you've read this far.
If and when ds gets assessed by CAMHS, if they ask about him as a baby do you think the points above will be taken into consideration?
I seem under the impression that early development is important in a dx.
We're not even there yet, and i'm worried that they will just dismiss his issues and our concerns.