Man Sized Jumps

There are so many developmental milestones that Tate did not reach on time. Many of them I noticed, but some I never even missed. Being an experienced mother I am sometimes shocked at some of the ones I let slide by without wondering about. Once in a while Tate will do something that he has never done before and I’ll think, “WOW! This is huge (several years late, but so cool)!” About a month ago, Tate started jumping from the second step on the staircase, skipping the bottom step. My other kids did this long before kindergarten. Tate is twelve years old and six feet, two inches tall. This is one of those activities that I waited for but it just never developed. Levi is only three years older than Tate, and Sydney is two years younger, so they were often jumping off of steps, small retaining walls, the porch, and many other things. I tried to teach Tate to jump many times but he just could not do it. He could “sort of” jump if he was on a flat surface, no drop involved, but even then one of his feet always followed the other so that it was a hop or a skip and not really a jump.

My other kids would holler, “look at me!” or “watch me mommy!” as they jumped off of things or ran through the house and jumped over things. There’s that joint attention that I often talk about, once again. Tate never wanted my attention in the way a typically developing child would, so he never asked me to watch him do anything. But truthfully, there was not a lot of excitement going on in his world to watch. Don’t misunderstand. I am head over heels in love with my guy Tate and he did not have to “do” anything to impress me. I spent more time with him than any of the other children, teaching him things, helping him with things, trying to pull him out of his private world constantly. He mostly wanted to sit and stim or stare at something. And now, I’m off topic again…  This post is about why Tate did not jump, not about why he did not ask me to watch him jump.  (See: Look What I Can Do!)

I believe that Tate has found it so hard to jump for the same reason he struggles with many things. It is called spatial awareness. Have you ever had your arms really full and tried to walk down steps without being able to hang on to a rail or to see exactly where your feet are? It can be a little uncomfortable. Have you ever missed the bottom step because you miscounted? Maybe you thought there was one more step but you were at the bottom already? Or you thought you were at the bottom but there was one more step there? That awful feeling you get when you cannot tell exactly where your foot is or if you are going to fall or not is probably an approximation of what Tate felt for years just walking up and down the stairs. It took him a very long time to be able to walk up or down stairs without a tight grip on a railing. He would walk up one step at a time, bringing both feet on to the step but never alternating feet and climbing stairs quickly as his peers did. Finally, long after he should have, he mastered the stairs. 

Tate does not balance well. Like many people with autism, Tate needs both feet firmly on the ground in order to feel safe. He has a really hard time feeling comfortable if he is leaning back or standing on one foot. Remember my last post about his first trip to the dentist? Lying back in the chair that moved was so frightening to him. We had to practice at home. Here's the link to that post.

Why has Tate suddenly started jumping? It probably has a lot to do with the development of some of that spatial awareness lately. Remember the bike camp I have talked about? He learned to ride a bike this summer! (See the link here.) I think the bike riding may have taught him a lot about spatial awareness. He can balance on the bike and has gotten so much more confident surefooted across the board. After Tate started jumping off the stairs it wasn’t long until he was jumping into the pool. I had all but given up on that ever happening! Big things are happening at our house. They may be baby steps at your house but they are man-sized jumps in ours, literally.

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A sack of potatoes

When Tate was an infant, he behaved much like my other babies had. Occasionally I would scratch my head over something that seemed odd, but there were no sirens going off in my head or anything like that. I do remember Tate getting very upset when I changed his diaper from day one. The other babies had cried sometimes when I changed them but not to the degree Tate did. He got panicked anytime I had to remove his clothing or take the diaper off. I thought he was feeling unsafe or cold but I had no idea that these kinds of sensory issues could be indicators of autism. 

Tate never learned to nurse, although I had planned to feed him as I had my other babies. He just didn’t want to put forth the effort it took but he would take a bottle. I eventually gave up and used the bottles. I saw him as a baby and as a toddler ignore a growling stomach many times if it took too much work to satisfy his hunger. Once when he was a toddler and had a sore throat, he went for three days without eating and two of those hardly drinking anything. Just before I was going to take him to the ER and request an IV, he began to drink again.

Tate cooed, smiled, laughed and jabbered on time. He later learned words and began to talk on time.  He actually had a pretty good vocabulary with some big words before he began to lose them around age two. As a matter of fact, Tate learned, almost, too quickly and was interested in learning things that were not age appropriate. He learned the alphabet when he was very young and he recognized numbers and the spelling of his sibling’s names as a toddler. 

One indicator of autism is that a child will not play with toys appropriately. That might have been one of the first big things I noticed. Had I known that was a symptom of autism I would have began to suspect something a little sooner than I did. Tate enjoyed ribbons and he loved the ties on his crib’s bumper pads. He would play with them instead of the toys I gave him. My mom sewed some long strips of material so he could have them to play with outside of his crib. We thought it was funny, sweet, a little quirky, but still no sirens were blaring in my head. Later, when he could crawl, I would often find him running his fingers up and down an electric cord. His favorite cord was on the vacuum cleaner.  The vacuum cord was round instead of flat. Tate was terrified of loud noise and hated the vacuum if it was turned on but he could not resist the vacuum if it was quiet. I used to say he had a love affair with the vacuum. There were a couple of times I remember shaking my head and saying “maybe he has autism.” The only thing I knew about autism was that kids with autism had strange interests and performed repetitive behavior. It was not until Tate was two and a half that I learned what autism was and wished I had paid attention to what must have been my uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong. Saying “maybe he has autism” was probably my way of voicing my concern.

One of the most unusual behaviors Shawn and I noticed and discussed, long before we knew it meant anything at all, was Tate’s limpness. He was just “there” when we picked him up. He didn’t hold on, he didn’t move to situate himself on our arm. He didn’t lean into us. He didn’t even adjust his weight or grab hold of us when we went around a corner. We had to do all the work. We wouldn’t have known this was “different” except we had five babies before him. We knew that babies hold on to a shoulder or lean into the one carrying them and they are not nearly as hard to carry as Tate was. He was like a sack of potatoes; and a sack of potatoes is a lot harder to carry than a typically developing baby or toddler. Tate didn’t seem to have a sense of WHERE he was in space. He also didn’t figure out how to move his body to make himself (and others) more comfortable. Not that he would have CARED about making others more comfortable because he also was not learning that people around him were not having the EXACT same thoughts and feeling he was having. But THAT is another topic for another day.

That spatial awareness has plagued us for a long time. You cannot learn to ride a bike if you cannot balance yourself and adjust to movement. Then there is something as simple as giving a hug. Hugging Tate is like hugging a big beanbag. He just doesn’t know what to do with his arms and if we can get him to put his arms around us he doesn’t put any oomph into a squeeze at all. He does try because he knows that hugs make me happy but he is almost eleven years old and I’ve never really gotten a good hug from him before. It is like he is trying to hug me but his arms have been shot full of Novocain so he cannot make them do anything but hang. He might want to exert some kind of pressure but he doesn’t know how much force to exert because he doesn’t feel things the same way we do. One of the best presents I could ever get in this lifetime would be a hug, a real hug, from my boy Tate.

Another post you might like:  Look into my eyes

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