Sophie regresses somewhere around 3 to 3 1/2. She basically stopped responding to people. Her speech was very limited. Sometimes asking for things like “waffle” or “my sandwich”. Previously she had been able to repeat many things, including counting to 20 and to 10 in spanish.

Before regressing she pointed and waved bye bye. She began to line up toys which she did constantly. She always had to have 3 toys in her hands. Sometimes she would giggle and scream for no reason and
spin in circles. She would sometimes stare into the air and giggle like she was seeing things that weren’t there. She would have temper tantrums and she was often hard to console.

We started to see a DAN doctor right after her diagnosis. I had been scouring over the internet for hours everyday and had learned quite a bit. I was not happy with the DAN Doctor. He wanted her to start a lot of supplements, but they didn’t seem to be the current norm for treatment. I was mainly obscures supplements that I was not hearing anything about on all of the biomedical treatment websites. The advice seemed out dated. I didn’t feel good about his advice so I stopped seeing him.
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When Sophie was around 19 months, and wasn’t yet walking, her doctor discovered that she had flat feet and an abnormal gate. He made an appt. for an evaluation from the first steps program.

A physical therapist examined Sophie and determined that she also had weak ankles and hyper mobility. He said needed braces to support her ankles and her arches and to force her feet into the correct position. He said she would probably have to wear the braces and have therapy for years. He also told us at that time that her speech was delayed because she wasn’t walking and some part of the brain was triggered by walking and that once she was walking everything else would catch up. We had the braces made and he began coming to the house weekly.

My daughter hated physical therapy. She would cry as soon Idel, her therapist, would come in the door. My husband and I would have to hide in another room and eventually Idel would get her to calm down. It was usually 30 minutes of the hour he would spend with her just trying to get her to stop crying. I would listen from the other room and hear him talk with her. He was very gentle and kind and eventually she would begin to play with him and he would get her taking steps and working with him.
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I tried to start writing Sophie’s Autism story from the beginning and I realized I was writing a book instead of a blog post. I decided to try to start writing about where we are right now, which was my intention for this blog from the beginning. I want to use this as a way to track her progress and to share what has helped her and what hasn’t.

So here is a quick history of the start of autism in my precious girl. She was diagnosed offically with Autism on December 21, 2006. We had figured out something was wrong on Thanksgiving of that year, a month earlier, and had started the gf/cf (Gluten Free, Casein Free) diet on the last week of November. She was 3 1/2 at the time.

Sophie was a beautiful, healthy baby. She hit all of her milestones, though she seemed to be slower then my other 2 children were to hit them. She smiled, sat, rolled over, crawled, said words, waved, blew kisses, all the normal things that babies and toddlers, do just a little delayed.
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