He laughs when the other kids laugh (good superficial appearance of fitting in.) But then when I listen closely, his comments are a beat or two too late...the other kids have moved on (with their lightening speed) to another related topic and he is still stuck on the first item they were chatting about.[...]Like I said, it is nothing overtly obvious to a casual observer, but when seen closely, his interactions are just a bit off.
I'm really going to watch him over the next few weeks. This may be what he's doing. I have noticed that the conversations sometimes move on and he's not said what he wanted to say. That's the 'thinking' that I see him doing. By the time he gets the thought, the conversation has sometimes moved on. He doesn't do that with us at home, but I have seen this recently in his new co-op class. I don't think that anyone else would notice this, but I have and just assumed that he would have to learn how to keep up with the conversation.
In other areas he is completely blind, and not just a little off. I have seen kids obviously snub him...turn away when he says hi or move away when he walks over...yet he does not even notice.
This is the kind of thing that we saw a year or so ago when he first began interacting with a group of children at the YMCA. A few times after class I brought up incidents and he would tell me that he did know that something wasn't right, but he didn't know "why" the kid had acted the way he did toward him (and I didn't either, as I saw no obvious trigger... just kid behavior, I guess.) Yet there were other times when he
did seem clueless. I chalked it up to lack of social experiences and the fact that it was a fairly unstructured setting. "It's all new to him," I thought. That was almost two years ago, and with the exception of the Einstein comment, he's not had any 'duh' moments that I've noticed. It seems that I've been viewing this all wrong.
Kate, I cannot thank you enough for sharing this info with me. This really helps me see this in a new light.
