Our ds was dx gifted and ASD-2 at 7 yo. He was our first child, and it took us a long time to realize that what we thought were normal childhood quirks were actually not. I didn't know much about autism. His desire to line everything up was cute. We laughed at how kids can really do the same thing over and over and over again without getting bored. We rolled our eyes at his social flubs and muttered "kids say the darndest things" regularly. But eventually, things just got harder and harder. Not only was he howling like a wolf for an hour at a time (I want to give my kids liberty to use their imaginations, right?), but now he was teaching his younger siblings to do the same, and there was only so much howling I could handle... I knew kids can get upset when you have to change plans, but was it really normal for a 7 yo to be crying about things as often as he did? I know battlebots is cool and all, but did he really have to talk about it for 10 hours a day, every day, for 9 months straight? And why, oh why, could he not understand that a very simple rule of "No throwing food at the table" also includes orange seeds, even though we don't TECHNICALLY eat them??
At 7, we wrestled with the idea of an evaluation. We ended up pursuing one after we sat on the couch talking one day after a row, and he just shared that he thought he was a good boy inside, but he didn't understand why everyone treated him like he was a bad boy all the time. Two years later, I don't understand why it took us so long to put the pieces together, other than the fact that we wanted him to have a fun childhood, and we had no older kids to compare his development to. And he's really smart, so he was limping by with a lot of coping skills he'd figured out on his own. But now, at almost 9, it's so much more obvious that he is different than his peers. It was really hard to tell at 3 or 5, because much of what he did could've been chalked up to cutesy or immaturity or some other such thing.
