In the Beginning...

My pregnancy with Tallen was pretty normal. I already had 3 other children and I had also had a miscarriage that same year. The one thing that sticks out in my mind as unusual is the glucose tolerance test that my doctors insisted I take. I had never had to do this with my other pregnancies. As it turned out, I did have gestational diabetes, which I controlled with diet. I really took issue with this test because, from what I could understand, your system is positively overloaded with glucose in order to find out whether or not you body can process it. If it can, then fine, no harm, no foul. But what happens when it can't. What are the effects on the baby inside of you during this test? One of my main reasons for focusing on this test is the fact that, unlike some children on the spectrum who started out normal at birth and then had behavior changes and loss of speech etc... after receiving vaccines, Tallen was different from the very beginning. Different in ways that other people did not notice, but I did.

He slept very soundly. Nothing bothered him. Coughing, laughter, slamming doors, loud music, none of these startled him awake. But all of his hearing tests at birth were normal.

He had bad skin over his nose and and on his cheeks, just beneath his eyes. Not the usual little pimples that babies sometimes get after birth, but more like tiny, almost blackhead like, bumps. His pores there were enlarged as well.

He made this strange, humming, almost growling sound when he nursed or had a bottle. To this day, he makes that sound when he is eating a food that he loves. Almost like he slips away into some sort of trance. However, after years of coaching from all of us, I now hear him tell himself, " Just chew and swallow.", whenever he catches himself making the noise.

When trying to soothe him to sleep, he did not like the motion of the rocking chair, which was back and forth. He preferred to be rocked side- to- side, which is not easy on a tired mommy's arms...

While all my other babies had loved to be sang to, he preferred to be told stories or to have the ABC's or numbers repeated over and over. This lulled him to sleep.

He would go completely off the deep end if he had a BM and it wasn't removed from him within seconds. Even if we were only 5 minutes from home, we had to pull over and change his diaper.

While most babies love to be bundled up and swaddled, he hated it... The fewer clothes the better. His father was always insisting that he wasn't wearing enough clothes or underneath enough blankets. But whenever I tried, he would cry. Even when I was sure he must be cold at night and would put him in a fuzzy sleeper, he would begin to sweat. It always seemed like his temperature gauge was "off".

Needless to say, his first few weeks were a real adventure...