A Subject Close to My Heart

I was reading an article on Foxnews.com/health. This one touches me closely. Not only is this family from the community I live in but one of the fears I have is that this will be what Baby MM will have to go through. Autism.


Field of Baby Psychiatry Tries to Identify Disorders Earlier
Monday, May 14, 2007
A brief excerpt on baby Jacob, you can link to the rest of the article above.

"We used to say it was like it burned his eyes to look at you," said his mother, Tamie Day of Antelope, Calif. "It was like a physically painful thing for him. It wasn't just that he wasn't looking at us; he was purposefully looking away."

Day, who has a psychology degree, suspected her son might have autism. She enrolled him in a study, published in April, that found that babies like Jacob are indeed at high risk for autism if they do not respond to their names by 12 months of age.

Jacob, now 3 1/2, has made meaningful progress thanks to treatment, his mother said, including a breakthrough moment at age 2. It still makes her cry to recall it.

She was giving Jacob a bath, playing the "itsy bitsy spider" finger game, when he looked up and really gazed into her eyes. "He was smiling up at me and I realized that was the first time he had done that," she said. "He has gorgeous blue eyes, and I was like, `My God, your eyes are so beautiful."

The promising signs is that Baby MM shows none of the early detection signs that little Jacob did. It still does weigh on the back of my mind and only time can tell what Baby MM's life will bring him. He is such and joyful and smiley boy and every day with him is a blessing.