Introduction to Miss Monkey’s first year

Written By Claire So, we are a family of 4, Adam my amazing fiancé and fantastic father to our beautiful children, Miss Monkey (4, 5 in March) and Mr Monster (2, 3 in July) and then there is me. I should also tell you about my mum, Teresa who is a big part in this story and our lives who without her support and determination this journey would be a whole lot harder. At the moment both children are non-verbal and incontinent, Miss Monkey was diagnosed with Autism in January 2017, and Mr Monster is currently under assessment for Autism and Global Developmental Delay.

I worked in care for 6 years with children and adults with additional needs, challenging behaviour and physical disabilities, this gave me some experience and insight to the signs of additional needs, and definitely helped us to recognise these signs in our own children. Working within this industry I attend a lot of training for Autism, challenging behaviour, managing behaviour, strategies and many others. Luckily for us I could use some of this training to recognise early signs and to start using some techniques for early intervention. Also having worked within the care industry I got to know how basic assessments and investigations worked, this helped me to find the right paths to take and get our children the support and input they need. Don’t get me wrong it was by no means an easy journey, we had to fight every step of the way and the fight never ends as many of you well know. So, let me tell you about Miss Monkey’s first year and when we started to notice signs she may have additional needs and how I started the process of getting the support we needed. We started to notice signs with Miss Monkey from around 5 months, she did not smile or giggle as much as other children of her age, she also often wouldn’t make eye contact. As time went on there appeared to be more milestones that Monkey wasn’t quite reaching. She didn’t really babble or gargle, She showed no interest in toys for their intended purpose, she just like to move them from one place to another, line them up or throw them, quite often resulting in me or Daddy being in the firing line for some well thrown plastic toys. Monkey would army crawl everywhere and didn’t start crawling until she was 17 months old, when she did start to crawl she would often fall. She showed no interest in playing with other children, in fact would often push them away or just keep moving away from them. We would get moments where Monkey would let Daddy or I join in with her game but only for very short periods of time, these moments are so special and we treasure every one, every so often these periods would last around 10 minutes. She much preferred her own company. Meal times were a nightmare, most of the time taking us up to an hour to finish, and Monkey is extremely fussy about what she would eat.

Anyway as we noticed these things we voiced them to our health visitor who started to carry out assessments, to establish how and where abouts Monkey was developing, she also began to look into referrals. Adam, Teresa (my mum) and I began to notice that Monkey would often zone out and stare into space. When this was happening you could wave your hands in front of her face, click your fingers, wave toys, sing, dance, act like a dog, be as silly as you could there was no response from little Monkey. After speaking to the health visitor and Dr, Miss Monkey was referred to an epileptic consultant as they thought these could possibly be vacant seizures. All this happened within Monkeys first 17 months in this world, we were yet to discover what the next year would entail, but we knew it was going to be a tough one. I hope this has given you some insight into the start of our journey, I must ensure you are aware this is just our own experience as a family, every case, every family, signs and experiences are different. Check out our blog next week to find out what happened over the next year of Miss Monkey’s life. As always if you have any questions or have anything you want us to write about please get in touch and let us know. Much Love Claire