How are you doing, Gud?

Ugh.

I do have to tell you that I was an only child who spent almost all my time around adults and I did this. I am very far from autistic/aspergers, it was just a function of a) being shy and b) not being familiar with actual children (I think I thought I was just a small adult)

(Well, I was an only child until I was six and got the steps, and then I was a middle half of the time and an only the rest of the time.)

I was always much more comfortable around adults or immersed in a book. I was always quite the reader.

I honestly think that, because you are worried, you should bring it up and do whatever testing is felt appropriate.

Huh. It's probably a good thing my mother didn't have access to the internets, or she'd have decided I was autistic.

Not making light of your concern, Susan, and you are very much doing the right thing to pay attention to your daughter and get professional assessment, but Annabel sounds just like me at 18-ish months old. Even with the not talking. (I recently received my own baby books and letters from my Mom, so I know this).

Ugh.

I'm sorry. *mwah*

A lot of bright kids are late talkers (and a speech eval and therapy, if the eval deems it necessary won't hurt her), because they're a little inclined to be perfectionists. They want to do it right before they do it.

That would certainly fit in with how she learned to crawl and walk, though she did both slightly on the early side if anything--she went from not doing them to doing them well practically overnight, with no obvious intermediate steps. In evolutionary terms, she's a punctuated equilibrium kind of kid.

And I've sometimes suspected she's trying to figure out the whole package--speech, literacy, even a beginning degree of numeracy--all at once, and that could be slowing her down. She's fascinated by numbers and letters. She has a numbers board book, and she'll bring it to us and point to the numbers for us to name them. And whenever we wear shirts with large lettering, she loves to point to the letters, and I swear this morning she was imitating me when I named the letters on my sweatshirt as she pointed to them.

Dylan even swears that when he had her in Target this weekend, he heard her saying something like "uh uh aye aye" and looked to see her pointing at a sign noting that everything on that rack was $11.99.

So I just don't know what to think. She's clearly saying less than most 18-month-olds, and doesn't seem to grasp that she could use words to ask for things. But as far as I can judge her comprehension from nonverbal expression, if anything she's ahead of the curve. So I don't know what it means that she appears to understand so much without feeling much need to communicate back.

A lot of bright kids are late talkers (and a speech eval and therapy, if the eval deems it necessary won't hurt her), because they're a little inclined to be perfectionists.

Me, for one. Well, my momma thinks I'm bright. Anyway, I was late in speaking, and went almost immediately to complete sentences. And thence to scaring my older (by 8 years) sister's friends with my allegedly big words. Which I probably mispronounced because I read way more than I talked. But still.

I also had a hearing problem that was picked up fairly quickly and a vision problem that wasn't. Both contributed to me not interacting with other kids much. So, yeah, an over all check up probably wouldn't hurt, but there are a lot of things that Annabel could be dealing with. Including nothing at all.

I'll have to ask my mother if Hanna's diagnosis was just speech delay, or if she's considered to be somewhere in the AS.

I strongly suspect that my brother has Asperger's, though he was in the first wave of kids labelled ADD. (Back before they added the H to most of them.) Asperger's fits his actual behavior more.

As a result, I'll be keeping a careful eye on my own kidlet and knocking on a lot of wood until she starts talking.

Ugh.

A funny:

We went to a wedding on Sunday. The Bride walked down the aisle to the Them from Angel. I leaned over to Joe and said, "Do they not realize Buffy kills him like, 4 times?"

I think I'm borderline Asperger's. I find it difficult to make eye contact (so I pretty much never do) and am often oblivious to others' emotional states. Plus I have some other stuff, like social anxiety. Or maybe I'm just weird. But then, I took an online test that said I have AS so it must be so....