In the post My Adventures in Motherhood I shared with you some of the things I had learned as I have grown as a mother. Now, it’s time to meet each of the kids.
Ethan is the oldest. He was born in 2010 a week before Nathan and I celebrated our first anniversary. This pregnancy was not what any expectant mom wants to go through. I was put on bed rest and then eventually ended up on hospitalized bed rest because of preeclampsia. At about 36 weeks my doctor made the call that Ethan needed to be born to keep both of us healthy.
Not Meeting Developmental Milestones
As Ethan started getting bigger, I noticed he wasn’t hitting milestones the way he should have been. At his 9 months well check we had a standard form to fill out about milestones and such. This was from Florida State University and the First Words Project. It was a standard form that they had everyone in the practice fill out. A few weeks later I got a call from FSU asking if they could talk with me a little more about his results. There were a few red flags for Autism they said and that they would like to do some further screening. So we did this, and we continued with First Words for a few years. During that time, they referred us to Early Steps, which in Florida provides early intervention. Ethan was in early intervention for speech therapy until he turned 3 and aged out of the program.
When he was newly 4 years old FSU and First Words set up a meeting with Nathan and me, and we went through all the years of evaluations they had done with him. At the end of this meeting, they told us that based on all this gathering of information that Ethan is indeed Autistic. For me, that was like a huge sigh of relief. I had seen that he wasn’t processing things like his peers, that he wasn’t developing in the timeline of his peers and now I had the answer of why. Nathan, however, took some time to come around to this diagnosis.
How to Raise an Autistic Child
One thing that we had to decide was how we were going to raise an Autistic child. Thankfully, I have a friend who also has an Autistic child and she got me in touch with a few different local groups. As I was doing my research, I learned what type of therapy I did and did not want to use. What we decided on was Play Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Physical Therapy. In the past few years, he has graduated from all his skill-based therapies. To say we are proud of him for this would be an understatement.
As I’ve shared previously, we tried private school for Kindergarten and that was a total failure. Homeschooling him has given us the opportunity to get to know him better and how he learns best. I love spending my days with him, helping him learn how to learn. Homeschooling is allowing us the explore topics he is interested in, at a speed that is good for him. He has spent time learning about Pre-History, Dinosaurs, Astronomy to name a few of the deep dives we have taken.
Ethan is an amazing big brother. He really likes taking his siblings outside and playing with them. One thing that he is looking forward to this coming year is getting to show some goats at the fair. He loves everyone so much and feels very big feelings.
I am so happy that I get to be his mom. My biggest goal is to raise him to be a kind, well-rounded person and to know that he is loved.
It’s so awesome that you are able to homeschool your on and give him the attention and education that works best for him! Plus, showing goats sounds really fun haha
Goats are so much fun and they are pretty cute.