how does he present?

Present is a word that is thrown around often in relation to the spectrum disorders and it is funny how quickly you also start to use it. I wonder if it is just to sound like you know something about what your child is going through, even though I imagine most of us are quite as clueless as the next, but "present" certainly makes you sound as if you have endless amounts of secret knowledge buried inside of you.

So anyway, below are some of the characteristics my son presents with... (I started this list and realized how extensive it could become so below is not truly ALL of the characteristics that we have found, but some of them and I will continue to add to this).

1. Obsessions - even at an early age we noticed this. It started with batteries and remote controls and for a time we were worried that he would grow up be a TV repair man because how could he ever want to be anything else with such a great love of batteries and remote controls!
2. Rocking, hand flapping - from what I have read these characteristics are not typically associated with Aspergers and are more so related to Autism, but come on...there is nothing "typical" about anything on the spectrum disorder. It started with the rocking....just rocking upon rocking upon rocking. Sitting on the couch he will rock and rock and rock, driving in the car he rocks and rocks and rocks. It seems to soothe him. It is amazing that he can rock so strongly and still be able to focus on TV. Looking back at when he was an infant I can remember that he was only content to fall asleep if I rocked him quickly. For quite a long time I thought that I was the cause of his rocking behavior. I'm not sure when it happened, but he developed a hand flapping "thing" that he does. It's kind of like a really excited clapping flappy thing.
   
3. Lacking imaginative play - he never played with toys in the "traditional" sense. He played with batteries and remotes, he took video cases to bed with him and "snuggled" them and he never played with the Little People. He lined things up, perfect rows in specific order over and over and over again. I will never forget when he was maybe 18mths or so and we had a playdate with a girl friend of us 2 weeks younger than him. She was playing with the Little People Carnival and she took the clown, put him on the ferris wheel, and spun him around. Watching her do that was shocking to me. I will never forget that moment because I sat back and though "Huh, look at that." My son had never ever done that and still to this day would never do that. His obsession now is Star Wars and watching him you wouldn't instantly catch the lack of imaginative play (this is why it took us so long to figure it out!) because he could play for hours with a lightsaber...but if you watch very closely you will realize that he is acting out the movie, verbatim. There is no changing the scrip, there is no veering off the dialog, and heaven help you if you dare try to make Darth Vader kill Luke...enough said!
4. Social Awkwardness - my son loves other kids and has a true desire to make friends. For the longest time my husband and I would joke "Uhoh, here comes stalker boy" because our son would tell us that he wanted to make friends with someone and that meant that he would walk circles around them from three feet away, whispering off to the side "Hey kid, want to play something", which really only seemed to weird the parents out. This is the hardest of all of the characteristics because I see in his eyes the desire to make friends, but he just feels helpless on how to make it happen. He will often ask us to help him befriend someone. This worked for a while because he was so young, but as he gets older we need to help him build skills to make this less terrifying.
5. Lack in eye contact - this is a hard one to point out sometimes and we were not strong believers for quite a while. When he talks to us, he has moments of great eye contact, but that is because of his comfort level with us and even sometimes he is too flustered to talk and connect even with us. I recently went to a seminar about Aspergers and the speaker gave us an exercise that I think is extremely helpful in demonstrating how difficult eye contact can be for these children, here it is: We had to discuss at our table how we felt the seminar was going, did we like it, not like it, etc. The twist was that whatever words we said could not contain the letter 'n' in any part of the word. Try it, you will see how difficult it is to try to organize your thoughts, make eye contact, and generally follow the typical set of social interaction skills that we develop through interacting with people. You will find that you will stare off, look at your hands, the table, anywhere but at someone as you try to figure out what to say next.