Wow, so this is my first time blogging, so please bare with me here as I learn how to do this. Let me just start by explaining why I have decided to do this. My son Luke, on March 8, 2009, was diagnosed with Autism. This was just a month shy of his 3rd birthday.

I want to keep a journal of sorts here, so we can look back someday and say, "wow, look how far he/we have come."

Luke was born on April 9, 2006. I had a perfectly healthy pregnancy and delivery. He was our ray of sunshine, after suffering two previous miscarriages. We were first time parents, so we spoiled him rotten, maybe a little too much. I am proud to say that I was able to breastfeed him for 12 months, with only one supplement bottle a formula a day from 6 mo-12 mo.

At around 6 months of age we noticed that Luke was not sitting up on his own like he probably should have at that age. He finally met that milestone at 7 months. But, by 9 months, he was not crawling like he should have, but the doctor told us he was just a big baby, and would be delayed. But, we sought out intervention anyway through our state Early Intervention program. He recieved physical therapy, and was able to finally crawl at 12 months and walk at 16 months.

At 16 months, we enrolled Luke at daycare/preschool for the first time. Thanks to daddy's work schedule and a dear friend of ours, we were able to keep him out of daycare until then. This is when we first starting seeing signs that something was not quite right.

He did not respond to his name and did not like playing with other children. He wanted to play with his cars all the time. He had a hard time following directions. He did not talk as much as the other children and his language skills were lagging somewhat. We had his hearing checked and he was fine. However, again, we were just told to wait and see and that he was just a little behind.

Luke had this particular behavior, that we thought was rather cute for a while, he loved to flap his arms when he got excited. But, as we got to thinking, combining this "cute" behavior with everything else we had observed, the word autism crossed our minds. But, how could such a happy, smiling, cuddly and loving child have autism. In my mind, I always pictured autistic children as being non-loving, no-personality children.

We put off getting him evaluated for a while, hoping things would magically get better. We changed his preschool over to my work preschool program, which was the best move we could have ever made. He has incredible teachers that Luke adores so much. But, his teachers started to make comments to us about his behavior and they were concerned. I watched Luke play at school through the observation window and noticed that Luke was different than the other children. So, we bit the bullet and got him evaluated.