He Wants to Fly: Evelio's 1st Year

As a newborn, Evelio was such a good baby. By good baby, I mean the only time he ever cried was when he was hungry, wet, dirty etc. He never had fits for no reason. He never had colic, and he would wake up at night, eat, and go straight back to sleep. I was so relieved to find that he was not a cranky baby. My nephew was only 10 days younger than Evelio and he cried all the time.


For the first 6 months or so, Evelio seemed like any other 'normal' baby. He was usually happy and laughing. At around 7-8 months, I noticed that he didn't want me to feed him his baby food. He would only eat if I let him feed himself. I was surprised but thrilled at seeing him become more independent.


I started to feel like something might be wrong when he was 10 months old and still not crawling. Everytime this thought would cross my mind I would shake it off. We, (my mother, my nephew, my son, and I) were living in a 3 bedroom apartment that was all tile and I didn't let the kids have a lot of time on the floor. I was scared they would hurt themselves on the hard tile. I thought this was why my son wasn't crawling yet. My nephew being 10 days younger was crawling but I somehow did not realize it.


I also noticed that when I would put Evelio in his walker, he would raise his hands up in the air and shake his head back and forth making himself dizzy with his tongue out. I disregarded this as well. He just wanted to entertain himself. He didn't see alot of other kids so he made his own way to have fun.


Then one day, he was sitting on the floor with his legs folded underneath him so he was resting his bottom on the backs of his legs. He was shaking his head and laughing, and then he started flapping his arms really fast and my boyfriend's (at that time) dad said, "Look Evelio is trying to fly. Fly away, baby, fly away!"


I watched him for a minute laughing. Kids do the darndest things right? Well, I noticed that he flapped his hands alot, but still I saw nothing wrong with it. At that time I didn't know that flapping was a key characteristic of Autism. In fact, I didn't know much about Autism at all. I just figured, "Hey the kid wants to fly!"


Evelio started crawling finally right before he turned a year old. He still seemed pretty normal minus a few slightly weird behaviors previously mentioned. He said 'ma-ma' and made noises by then but no real words. But that's pretty much on track isn't it, for a 1 year old?


First Birthday Party 9.28.07