J's development

Today we went in for testing but before I went in I received an interesting phone call...
My mother lives in Mountain Home, Idaho and I had called her last night in distress about what the doctor had said and about how the testing today would go. She has a friend there, who I have met and who has a special device for testing, which I personally believe to be very accurate. I have seen this device in action for myself and it is very simple in appearance but has never, to my knowledge, given a wrong answer. I would try to explain the science for those of you who need those kind of facts to be able to believe, but I honestly don't hold those details in my brain for very long and once I know something works, that's all I need.

Based on her testing she explained that, yes, the tendencies that J has been showing are typically labeled autistic. The causes for his autistic symptoms were a combination of things...

I'm going to time-skip back...
When J was 2 yrs. old we discovered he has an allergy to wheat. No, not a gluten intolerance (please don't talk to me about that because I already know!). We discovered it because for three days in a row his body would reject what we were feeding him. He wasn't keeping anything down and at first I thought maybe he had caught some sort of bug. But he didn't have a fever or show any lethargy usually associated with being sick. I called our mother's friend, who does this special testing, to find out what was wrong. She said to stop giving him wheat and he would recover. We had been giving him a lot of bread around this time so it was a pretty difficult change. But we changed his diet, and it worked. He kept his food down and we cleared out everything from our house that we thought could make him sick like that again.

A short time later I noticed that he was still getting sick fairly often, that it wasn't normal. We called our testing friend and she identified another allergy: Rice. Not just any rice, white rice and basmati rice. He can still have brown rice or jasmine rice. We started going through all the labels that we had looked through before but instead of looking for wheat ingredients, we looked for rice. Like I said, it wasn't a gluten problem, but we ended up shopping in a lot of the "gluten free" areas to get a variety and now we discovered that a LOT of these items had rice.

And the discovery continues... We have still gone to the store and bought things unsuspecting, only to discover later, the reason they were cheaper or on sale is because they were packed with fillers like wheat or rice. Meat patties, french fries, various candies, the list goes on, and for someone who hasn't had to live like us, you'd be surprised.

Time skip back to now... Our testing friend says that immunizations and modified foods (which is part of the reason for J's reaction to wheat or rice) are THE major contributors to my sons stunted development. With a LOT of strict changes in diet and some homeopathy, our son can heal, but not with traditional medicine.

This is so hard for me. I hate sounding like a whiner, but I'm going to whine, so feel free to skip this paragraph.  WHY ME!? God isn't supposed to give us anything He doesn't believe we can handle, but like the great Mother Teresa, must he believe me to be so strong? Other parents have dealt with this, I know I'm not alone. But other parents don't deal with this and have NO CLUE how hard it is... I can't take my kids to fast food anymore, I can't take my kids to just any grocery store shelf and say "What do you want?" And recipes... let me tell you, we lack creativity already when it comes to food so this whole diet thing is getting pretty bland. I already disliked being in the kitchen before, so having to be more creative in there now WEARS ME OUT! And the expense... You've heard teachers don't receive the greatest pay, well Nate is still only making about half that... According to the income scale, we are poverty level. So putting even more of our budget toward special foods in NOT easy. We have to figure out what else to cut out of our already limited life.

After receiving this new knowledge, I wondered if I should continue with the school district's testing at all? Why bother if they were only going to tell me what I already know? Well, I figured, if the government did this to my kid, they owed it to me to help deal with the consequences.

The testing went good, I guess? J was very willing to participate but it wasn't exactly what I had anticipated. I expected the tests to be a bit more thorough in identifying specific knowledge and ability. The generality of these tests placed J in the very bottom of everything. I know J is far more capable than those tests revealed and the sweet ladies doing the testing acknowledged as much but, thanks to that government of ours, they were not allowed to deviate from the writing of the tests in any way. To their credit though, because of the crappy testing, we qualify for help.

J will be assigned a speech pathologist and he can attend preschool.

I still intend to have J's hearing and vision tested just to show others that those are not things impeding his development. The people of the school district did not give him label (such as autistic), not yet anyway. I don't know how much we will send him to preschool. Partly it depends how much they will allow me to be there to observe. I am excited to work with the speech pathologist, since I'm sure she will have some ideas on how I can help J learn some of those things he hasn't comprehended before now.


I'm sharing this will all of you because I want you to witness this journey and hopefully avoid some of the same mistakes and consequences. Do your research and make a decision before it's too late.