Meet the Kids - Christopher

This is Christopher, my firstborn son.  He'll be 6 next month which is something that just blows us all away.  He's our extra special guy, the one who pulls hardest on the heart, the one who needs the most.  You know how they say a mother always knows?  Well it held true in this case.  I knew by the time that he was 14 or 15 months old, but it took the rest of the world until he was almost 3 to catch up with me.  He's autistic.  He didn't talk at all until he was almost 2, and didn't use language in a constructive way until after he was 3.  He's been in school and therapy for 4 years now, and take a special multivitamin and fish oil and they have all made a tremendous difference in him.  He's in mainstream kindergarten this year and we are so proud of him.  He still has very little in the way of social skills - which is why we were so intent on mainstreaming him.  He needs the peer modeling to learn those skills.  But you'd never believe this is the same kid, who wouldn't look at you, and would get so frustrated he'd scream trying to tell me what he wanted to eat.

We call him Bubby, and half the time you ask him his name, that's the answer you'll get.  He's our Bubba, Bubbalicious boy.  He is delicious.  From his bright blue eyes and dimple to his hobbit feet I'd eat him up if he'd let me.  He loves the t.v. (way too much - bad mommy, no cookie for you!) and has recently graduated from Dora and Blues Clues to Ben 10.  Now I'm having to learn all the names of the guys on there for him.  But I'll do it happily.  I hate Dora!  He's really good on the computer, and spends half his waking life on the trampoline, leading to the most amazingly strong thighs I've seen on a kid.   In the summer he turns into a fish and it takes an act of God to get him out of the water.  It makes him happier than pretty much anything else in the world - but he still hates baths.  Go figure.  He's a conundrum, our boy and we wouldn't want him any other way.