me & mommy...

So...we finally joined a mommy & me group, excited to have a social outlet for the first time in awhile. Met an amazing group of other 'first' time mommies. In the beginning, Hunter was the only boy in the group, and as you can imagine, super popular! ;) Hunter spoke with very few words, while most of the girls were saying 3-word phrases, I was amazed but everyone told me that 'boys' are always slower at speaking, what did I know, I'm a first time mommy. Hunter also liked being on his own a bit more, where as the other girls liked doing things together. I thought, 'boy thing' again, he was surrounded by girls (some things never change as you will read in later posts) who wanted to do girly things and he probably just wanted to play with trucks, right!? There were some amazing things that Hunter did that others did not seem to do. He always seemed really happy, hardly ever cried, took 3 hour naps and would wake up smiling & singing like a little song bird. Everyone use to say, "wow, I wish my baby was like that - he is such a great baby"! He knew all his upper and lower case letters by age 1, and in the sweetest teeny tiny voice he would also go through the entire alphabet saying "b is for ball", "c is for cat" etc...He also seemed to be able to read and perfectly pronounce words on the Scholastic website that he and M would look at, hmmm baby genius? He did love the Baby Einstein series, it must be that! He loved everything educational and by 1.5 he was reading a numbers book and counting up to 100 in increments of 10. We did flashcards, I guess they were really paying off but he seemed to be able to memorize anything he saw. Another thing he loved was foreign languages so I bought him baby videos of French and Spanish and within a few days, he was naming things like apple in 2 other languages; pomme, manzana....wow! Other things he did that were a bit different and not as positive, Hunter covered his ears alot, especially when we would walk into a new place/room/store (especially Target)...he also seemed to walk on his tiptoes. I will never forget when some woman walked up to me on a playground and said, "not sure if you know anything about Autism, but your son is walking on his tiptoes and playing alone and you may want to research it". I was devastated, scared and really mad! Who was this stranger and why did she feel the need to speak to me like that? I remember crying all the way home and then as soon as M got home from work, telling him all about it. He then surprised me by telling me he had been researching the little things that Hunter had been doing for awhile too, and every time he would search a new topic, all the google searches would point to "Autism". So, not only was I mad at this strange woman, I was now really angry with my husband! When I asked why he did not talk to me about it, he said he wanted to be sure before he started to worry me...all I could think of was NO, NO not by baby boy!!!