Our story is no different than almost any other family who has an autistic child. It's been difficult but rewarding. We are more fortunate than some, in that Lily craves interaction from us, her language has improved drastically, and she seems to not be on the severe end of the autism spectrum. But being that she's three years old, I'm sure the majority of the journey is still in front of us.
We're looking forward to her starting her full day school program in September. We're so optimistic that the teachers working with Lily can make some significant gains. Although the staff seem to be conservative in their goals, my goal for Lily is to be mainstreamed with her peers. I desperately want a normal childhood for her. She's shown so much improvement, I can't help but be optimistic. Hopefully at school she'll start making friends and interacting better with other kids. There's been glimpses of promise, as she's recently approached other children and offered toys as gifts of friendships....something we couldn't even have imagined her doing just a year ago. The year of early intervention really made a difference for her.
But the reason I'm writing this particular post is that she seemed to have another milestone today. Lily has always loved music. Even in the beginning, before we knew she was on the austistic spectrum, Lily loved music. Mostly nursery rhyme type music. She loved the show "It's A Big World". In fact, as our pediatrician sent us to have her hearing evaluated to see why she wasn't talking, I knew her hearing wasn't the problem. She wasn't speaking but she would hum along to the melody as the characters sang the songs. Although she's always been into music, she's never expressed much interest in the music on the radio. In the car she always preferred to play with her toys, which each play a childlike rendition of some little jingle...much to my irritation as I tried in vane to listen to the songs I like.
Today that suddenly changed. Since we were so tired of watching Barney over and over on the DVR, we decided to change the channel to one of those cable channels that broadcast music. We ended up settling on the station that specializes in 80's music. My wife asked Lily, do you want to dance? To which Lily enthusiastically started to rock back and forth, punctuated by spinning to the music. Although it was borderline stemming activity we were both surprised that she was enjoying some music that we enjoy as well. It just happened to be right before dinner that we made this discovery, and little did we know how much she liked the music. After putting her in her chair and unsuccessfully attempting to get her to partake in some baked ziti, Lily loudly proclaimed, "I want down! I want dance!" We were shocked! The little things mean so much to us, as Lily has only been requesting things for a couple of months now (before she would just cry until we figured out what she wanted). So of course we allowed her to get down and dance. I finally had to mute the TV to get her to eat a few bites of dinner. Then more dancing! She's been doing great with eye contact too. It's the small victories that encourage us.
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