This is Alice. Our beautiful blue eyed Alice - she is so special to us I thought a whole blog post dedicated to her was necessary.
Alice is stubborn, fearless, happy, excitable, loving, unstoppable, intelligent, passionate and so much more.Alice loves cars, dinosaurs, barbies, computer games and being outside. The best description of Alice is to use a name one of her friends at early intervention has given her, she calls her "Rainbow Alice."
Alice also struggles. Currently Alice is diagnosed with speech language impairment, this may change (next week actually) as we go back to the developmental paediatrician's office armed with reports from teachers and speech therapists to hopefully get a diagnosis of PDD-NOS. For those not in the know this is best described as atypical autism. Meaning there are some traits/tendencies present but not enough to get a classic autism diagnosis.
Alice was born in November 2006 and named after her Great GREAT grandmother who was still alive and was able to know Alice for 2.5 years before passing away. She was a happy baby - but she was very hard to handle at times. A year ago if someone had of asked me if she showed delays in her first year of life I would of said no way. She babbled, she crawled she loved interacting with us and playing with us.
But now I have Madeleine who is almost one year old herself and I know that Alice was showing us signs that something was wrong from as early as 6 months. Just tiny things, things that a first time mum wouldn't notice. She never put her arms up for me when she was scared or emotional. She had no stranger anxiety, didn't seem to care who was looking after her. I swore that she babbled and she did say "bub" and "Mum" and "dad" but nothing compared to Madeleine. Madeleine has a constant stream of babbling words. With Alice it was random and not often and I remember never being able to catch it on camera.
It wasn't till Alice was two an a half years that we decided to get therapy. Our GP told us just to "wait and see" and well...I'm not really the kind of "wait and see" person. We went straight to a speech therapist and began working with Alice. A lot of it was changing how we spoke to her. We started putting her toys up higher, giving her drinks with the lid closed or snacks in containers that we knew she wouldn't be able to open, all in the effort to get her to ask for help. Not that she didn't try and do it by herself. I remember one day I handed her a container of grapes. She took it off me and went into her play room - where she sat for half an hour trying to open it by herself. Eventually she came back to me, but she didn't look too pleased about it. Matt and I became her voice, we would use one word sentences to describe everything "tree" "sky" "water" "ball." I would say within about a week we had progress. This has been the same with all her therapy, she catches on pretty quick. Her speech definitely exploded after speech therapy but she was still way behind. She developed echolalic speech where she would echo everything we said word for word perfectly, most of the time without understanding what she was saying or what we were asking of her. Eventually she started to use that echolalic speech as a type of self teaching tool. Like self talk. It went from echoing everything to just echoing things that she didn't understand. Questions mostly, it was as if she was giving herself extra processing time by repeating the question. If you asked her "Do you want a drink of water?" She would say "Do you want a drink of water?" *pause* "Yes!" To this day she still does this with things she doesn't quite understand.
She had trouble learning yes and no, trouble with pronouns "you" and "I", trouble asking for help, trouble speaking up at daycare. There were no conversations with Alice - unless it was something that interested her or something functional she wouldn't care. She couldn't answer what her name was, how old she was or anything abstract like that. Toilet training was not even an area we could look at.
At 3 years old she was still in speech therapy and someone recommended an Early Childhood Development Program for her. Run through QLD state special schools it is for children 0-6 years of age with disabilities including speech, physical and other conditions like autism. Alice was accepted and commenced going there in July 2010. She went two mornings a week for two hours. She was in a class with two other little girls and two teachers. I was so nervous the first day - but this place was amazing. Massive playground, dedicated teachers and other parents who knew exactly what we had been through. Finally we had some support and help.
Over the past two years Alice has developed in leaps and bounds. She was finally toilet trained at 4 years of age. She can now tell us things that she did during the day, although at times its like drawing blood from a stone. She has fortnightly speech therapy sessions and we did do some music therapy. She is now in Prep and doing dual placement with the early childhood development program. Three days at Prep and two days there. At the start of the year she couldn't write her name, didn't know any of the alphabet and now she can write her name and knows a lot of the alphabet and the corresponding sounds. She will hopefully be transitioning into full time prep at her school by the end of Term Two.
We are so proud of her. She still has difficulties though - she is drawn to the more socially inappropriate children in her class, often copying their behaviour. She has trouble paying attention and asking for help. Socially she struggles - sometimes she is over social and other times she uses inappropriate methods to gain attention from her peers. She seems very confident - because she is quite loud, but she is also emotionally fragile. She is often unable to express when she is sad until it reaches boiling point and she just has an emotional meltdown. She keeps herself together while at school but when she gets home her behaviour will become erractic and hard to handle. She loves her baby sister but has a very short temper with her.
So why am I sharing all of this? Two reasons actually. Firstly I've never really written down her story, our journey, like this and it's quite theraputic. Secondly, maybe sharing her story will help other families out there. Maybe a mother who is concerned about their child's development will stumble upon this blog and feel not so alone.
What I don't want is pity. I never have. Do I wish that we could make things easier for Alice? Yes. Easier for us? Yes. Would I change Alice? Not on your life. She is our Alice and she is perfect.
So for now we will continue this roller coaster ride. I will continue to fight every day for her, so that she can develop and grow and feel safe and loved. My little blue eyed girl is only 5 years old...and she has taught me so much about life.
She is our princess and we love her.
