Autism

Ben and I noticed that recently Michael has been ignoring us and avoiding eye contact.  He is more difficult to engage and has become more withdrawn.  Not that he was ever outgoing, but he was making progress and now seems to be backsliding.  One of my friends noticed it too.

His ECI therapist also noticed the regression on Thursday.  He wasn't responding to his name or making eye contact, but was hypersensitive to some background noises (like the washing machine running or my cell phone going off).  I asked her about revisiting the autism diagnosis, and she said that she's definitely noticing some stronger signs now, but again, it's still too early to say for sure.

That was still hard to hear.  I feel at fault based on my poor gut flora, my antibiotics at birth, the full vaccination schedule we had him on, his and my sub-optimal diets, and so on.  I suspect no one who is possibly reading this is sympathetic of my point-of-view here, which I guess is a good thing for once, because it means the only person who blames me is me.  I'm not sure how hard I want to convince anyone else that the causes of autism are quite possibly environmental, but here is an article that mainstream science (the American Association of Pediatrics) is starting to recognize the connection between gut and brain.  So yeah, this makes me feel rather terrible.  Naturally I want to give Michael every advantage in life I can and to think that I did something detrimental to him is devastating.

His therapist said that she recommended we remove from his sight anything that makes noise or has a battery (including music).  I balked a little -- even though we've never bought him anything that makes noise (unless you count the Kindle Fire), his relatives have gotten him noisy toys and he does seem to love them.  And his music!  He always needs to have a CD going in the background.  But he kept ignoring us during the session and turning on his battery-operated toys to have a constant stream of sound.  She then suggested we at least limit his exposure.  He's having sensory overload issues and would rather retreat into his own world with his noisy stuff than interact with us.  I asked why he goes out of his way to avoid eye contact (as in, if I keep trying to stick my face in front of his eyes, he'll avert his gaze so he never makes eye contact with me) and she said that eye contact can be intense and a lot of information for someone like him to take in, especially if his system is worn out from processing all the other input.

Since Thursday (so two days now) he's still getting quite a bit of his noisy toys and music, but much less than he had been.  We're slowly phasing it out.  His eye contact and interaction has been improving the last two days -- not perfect, but on the right path.

On an unrelated note, Michael can now run up the stairs without holding onto anything.  It's a little scary.

Michael problems

Michael qualified for state Early Childhood Intervention and is now seeing four different therapists (two private, two from ECI).  Still not talking.  His private speech therapist told me last week that she's never had anyone in therapy as long as him without learning to "turn on their voice," i.e. learning to vocalize his wants (not necessarily talk; grunting counts).  I've been leaving Michael alone at his sessions the last few weeks so I don't get to witness them anymore, but she told me she spent the whole hour trying to get him to say/grunt anything before she'd give him what he wanted, so they spent the whole hour doing pretty much nothing.  He'll point, he'll sign emphatically, but he won't speak.

He'll be 27 months old soon.  (Yes, I still count by months!)  He still nurses frequently, and let me tell you, it's a myth that lactational amenorrhea is a myth!  I haven't had a period in almost 3 years now.  This seems very harmonious if you believe, as I do, in the Weston A. Price foundation which states that traditional societies spaced children 3-4 years apart and that "[...] allowing at least three years between pregnancies permits the mother to recover her nutritional stores between children and to provide sufficient attention to each child..." (source).  So, in other words, traditional breastfeeding practices lend itself naturally to healthy child spacing.  God is pretty clever.

I love nursing him DURING THE DAY, but the nighttime nursing is getting incredibly difficult for me.  He got me up 4 times last night, and he always wants to lay ON TOP of me, which is not trivial when your "little baby" is now 30 pounds, so now I wake up every day with back pain.  He also sucks continuously, and as soon as I break the latch, he wakes up.  I am his "lovey."  And he's so big that, like I said, I can't comfortably nurse him continuously at night anymore.

So now I'm looking into night weaning.

Diet

I started a new temporary diet in a holistic attempt to heal my chronic inflammation.  It's complicated, but if I were to sum it up for people who don't really care but politely ask about it anyway:  inflammation is autoimmune, your gut is like 80% of your immune system, so if your gut is out of balance with bad bacteria, it causes a host of degenerative diseases such as chronic inflammation.  So my diet is an attempt to starve out the bad bacteria while replenishing it with good bacteria.  The two-pronged approach is to eat lots of easy-to-digest foods (that gets digested in the upper part of the GI tract and passed right through the lower, hence starving the bad stuff; also, not eating any sugar, including fruit, which feeds the bad bacteria) while eating a lot of probiotic foods (repopulating with good bacteria).  Ideally, this is for every single meal of the day.  I started off strong and am kind of burned out so I have been cheating a little lately, eating harder-to-digest foods, and I can tell the difference.

I could go on forever about digestive health.  In fact, I did but I erased it.  If you're interested, here is a good page that summarizes it:  Probably the Most Important Thing I’ve Learned About Health: Digestion & Elimination

I got a book out of the library by Weston A. Price called "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration."  Dr. Price was a dentist who traveled the world and found that people who traditional, nourishing diets were virtually free of cavities, tooth decay, and dental crowding.  They had wide jaws, generous nasal passages (unlike me -- I'm a mouth breather), and wide hips (for easy childbirth).  They were almost free of degenerative diseases and digestive disorders.  These societies, of thousands of people, didn't even have prisons.  As soon as these societies introduced "modern" foods, all the above became rampant  Amazingly, this was back in the 1930s!  "Modern white man" foods were simple things like white flour, canned produce, and refined sugar.  Imagine how "far" we've come since then.

After reading the book, I'm certain that my serious health issues are because of my diet when I was developing (starting with the fact that I was given soy formula, since Mom had to work and I had such a severe anaphylaxis to cow's milk that I was hospitalized).  Dr. Price's book is full of "before/after" photos and I am a perfect "after" specimen, with my severely deformed jaw and teeth, chronic health issues, mouth breathing, and narrow hips.  With all my health issues and the time and money I've sunk into treating them, truly I can attest an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  I'm sure if my parents had known, they would've done differently, but now we know.  The damage is done, but not for Michael.

And THAT is why I am so concerned about what Michael eats.  He is fighting an uphill battle, having to overcome my defects.  (He won't be able to truly overcome them.  It takes a couple generations to fix, and he didn't get the best start.)  I rarely let Michael eat any grains and if he does, it's fermented (e.g. sourdough) or sprouted grains.  He never gets refined sugar (he sometimes has honey or stevia), not even on his birthday.  More difficulty, I am trying to get him to eat nutrient-dense foods, such as raw egg yolks, liver, broth, and fermented cod liver oil.  (Sample dinner:  "Salisbury steak" made from a mix of ground beef, ground liver, and other offal, with a sauce made from ghee, reduced bone broth, and a raw egg yolk whisked in at the end.  He actually likes it!)  It's easier to keep things out of his diet than to get things in, but he's getting a little better now that he knows he can't hold out for fruit anymore.  I had been giving him fruit or sprouted bread or whatever just so he'll eat *something*, and now I don't.  He eats what I give him or doesn't get anything.  (Although sometimes I bribe him to eat nourishing foods with his favorite treat -- raisins.  However, it never gets to displace the healthy foods.)  It's tough love.  :-)  Right now he's snacking on dehydrated bone broth chips and grass-fed beef snack sticks.

Ideally I would've done all this as soon as he started eating solids.  This is a difficult time to start -- toddlers are notoriously picky.  I have Mommy Guilt over the stuff I gave him as a baby, genuinely believing it was healthy (liked puffed wheat cereal and oatmeal).  But as long as he's still growing, it's not too late!

I promised Ben I'd loosen up a little bit once Michael is around school-age.  Like, when he's 6, he can go out occasionally to Chick-Fil-A with the grandparents as a special treat, that sort of thing.  Until then, he's growing so quickly that I believe it's important he eats only wholesome foods.