When Griffin Was Just A Little Guy

Here he is with his weighted vest on lining up chess pieces just perfectly. Now is that an autistic trait or what? I believe that he is under 2 years old here, it could be that it is right after his diagnosis which was at 18 months. The weighted vest worked wonders for him and helped to keep him calm. By this time he had had early intervention since age 15 months and it certainly made a huge difference! I am a big advocate for early intervention because I believe that Griffin would not be high functioning today had it not been for that.

Here is Griffin eating a little bit of everything which he used to do before moving from Alaska. He ate vegetables, fruit, and meat back then but once we moved and he turned 5 years old it stopped and since then he mostly eats carbs, a bit of fruit, some chicken, no more fish, hot dogs, and more carbs! Gone are the days of variety.....if he had his way it would be pizza every night and chips. I don't know what happened but that transition threw him for a loop I guess and changed his life around. But I have heard that many kids, not just autistic kiddos, eat lots of carbs and have limited diets. I am not sure if Griffin's preferences have to do with textures or not but it does seem so because he either likes very dry and crispy like chips or kind of spicy like pepperoni on his pizza. He is sensitive to temperature too. How many of your kids out there have very picky diets? Also if he has cheese, it has to be extra sharp and he likes the tangyness of vanilla yogurt too.

I think that by the way that he eats that his mouth likes to get a lot of information/stimulation from strong tastes such as lots of garlic on his noodles and he likes the taste of ginger too. When he crunches chips that is giving his mouth information through crunching. His Occupational Therapist discussed this with me a couple of weeks ago. Griffin has low muscle tone throughout his entire body including his mouth so when he eats certain foods he gets stimulated by them. In speech, we are working on the Sh, Ch, Th sounds and the forming of the Oh sound and Wh sound. This takes more effort for him than the average kid. But he has begun to correct himself when he is talking which is exciting, it means that he is interested in being understood when he talks.