 The Thoughty Autie podcast. Starting off, I mean, looking back on my early childhood, what signs of autism did you first sort of see in me and what encouraged you to go and get a diagnosis for me in the first place? Okay, I thought I was absolutely smashing is that being a mum, because I had this perfect little baby who was like routinely and woke every four hours and wouldn't sort of make a moth, wouldn't cry when he wanted feeding, wouldn't cry when he did his, you know, obviously messed his lap, him, whatever, I didn't realize. Well, you asked him to come on, Tommy, you couldn't get these guys. So, I thought, wow, I must be amazing. First time I'm absolutely smashing this. What I didn't realize was that was very early signs of Thomas not communicating to me his needs right from being tiny, right from being a newborn. However, as he got older, I think started to change a bit and we saw kind of no motivation to kind of move or kind of press things up. He would become very fixated with lights in particular and that's still the same today, isn't it? Yeah. It's like we have abundance of lights and sensory lights around the house, which is lovely actually. It's really nice and calming but something that really helps Tom a lot. I'm just going to have a drink guys. So, yeah, I think it's so like because I imagine that with most babies and kids, they would have that sort of ignition to let the parents know that they need something. I think, I've spoken to a lot of parents which are with autism and I think until you have your second child, you think it's the norm. And you kind of are quite intuitive with your own child. So, you just kind of carry on and adapt your life and adapt things around your child. So, maybe when you have your second child or somebody actually unpicks it and points out the differences that you're doing that and maybe a bit unusual like your child's hair at night time when they're asleep. All right, yeah. I do remember that part of things. So, you ended up with a lovely little bowl cut quail offens, which you've improved on the hair styles now. Yeah, I do remember, I think I just, I found like hairdressers and dentists and like hospitals and stuff really hard. I think, like, I do actually remember the situation. I went to one Barbers and there was like loads of lights and loads of people around and there was like, I could hear all the hairdressers and I remember just being in a very sort of, like, I remember somewhat aspects to that experience. I can't remember which, when it was, but... It was about four. We're about four. But I found the hairdressers and going to it really, really hard, but also like the stuff around, like the clipping of scissors around my ears. I felt really, I was nervous about someone accidentally cutting me, but I was also, I just didn't really like the sound of it for some reason. So highly sensory though, isn't it? Yeah. It's caused a sensory outflow in itself. But I think once we kind of gone through finding somebody that would kind of follow you around and somebody that was very gentle and understood and had a low sensory environment and were able to get your hair cut, but I was sat outside the barbers the other day looking at Tom because I went to pick him up. I didn't stalk him out. I sat outside watching him just thinking, my goodness, you know, this is actually huge because all these years later, he's able to actually enjoy going to have his hair cut. Oh yeah, I like it. It's like a social... I would sit there looking in the mirror with everything that used to absolutely just make your life a mystery. I think the biggest reason why there was such a shift in that is because I went to a barber in Manchester and I intentionally, I went there. I wasn't expecting it to be too bad, but it was a bit like the the barbers, like a very aggressive of like the tugging and stuff. And I used to like go away with like watery eyes. And I even got like my eyebrows spreaded and stuff as well because I kind of, I used that place as like a way to like desensitize myself to it a little bit. That might not have been the best approach to it because it was very, very difficult, but I think now that I've found like a hairdresser's that's quite understanding about like my sensory needs, it's a lot easier for me and it doesn't worry me as much. I think it's just been exposed to it, isn't it? It's just... I think that's really key actually because quite often when I've spoken to you, it's not a criticism of any parent, but quite often a lot of parents kind of say, well, they can't do that because they have autism and I think from your early start, I used to sort of say, right, we're going to give this a go. I think maybe I was a bit kind of blasé about it. We said, right, we're going to give everything a go. Just say you've had experience of it and we'll move away from it if you're not happy. So we just gave everything a go and didn't put a ceiling on the things that you could do. So you kind of desensitized over time, but I think the biggest thing for me was there were a few very subtle things. Like you would sit and do repetitive hand movements when you're a little boy. You would sit like this just for hours doing this. You would spin on the floor and you would never get dizzy, but you didn't eat your milestones such as crawling. So some children kind of take their time and build up skills, whereas Tom would not do it, then all of a sudden he would crawl and then he would walk and then all of a sudden he got up and walled. So then the one thing was he didn't have a speech to lay a bit. I think I've got a worse speech to lay than anybody. He wasn't laid at his speech at all. His speech was really well developed. His cognitive ability, his learning, was really, really good early early. Oh, he would sit and repetitively go, sit with your granddad actually, and just go through a pile of books when he was about two or three, and just go through all the books for hours. Really good focus, but then when he went to school, because it was a different environment, different expectations and pressures, he actually stopped reading and ended up going in a group to kind of help him to read. So it's a bit of a shock. Yeah, so I kind of had those. I can't understand it now, but I didn't understand it at the time. I've learned a lot more as I've gone along. That was a big shock to me because you were doing so well and enjoyed it, and you just started. You were supposed to go to school to develop those skills at you. You are, but because everything else was so overwhelming, that kind of stripped back and a lot of parents talk about children losing skills. And they do, but all the things kind of take precedence. They do lose the skills, but then they make the skills will pick a, that the skills do come back quite often in most cases. Hey, YouTube. Hope you have enjoyed this podcast clip so far. If you want to check out the full episode, you can find it here on my YouTube channel under the podcast section, or you can go to Spotify, Apple, Google to check it out on different podcasting streaming services. If you have enjoyed this video this far, please make sure to like, perhaps drop me a subscribe if you want to see some more content from me, and drop a comment down below, even if it's something simple like an emoji or a heart. It really does help satisfy those big YouTube algorithm gods in the sky. Anyway, I'll let you go back to it. Yeah. I'm just going to want to hear me, okay? I just, I just want to be okay. Okay. Okay. Now, there's something that you said about, like, so the speech delay, because the speech delay is something that I get asked about a lot by, as I said, people either in comments or sort of sending me messages or asking me on lives. When did I start speaking? When's like the milestone that most people? It was really late. So you started sort of seven, six, seven months. Wow. And you didn't say mama. I'm all done. And he said mama, which was the dog's name, which was made disappointing for me, but he did lots of bubbling. And that's kind of the difference between kind of typical autism, I suppose, and the Asperger's diagnosis as it was. Actually, there was no speech delay. So that was kind of all of the differences that I first picked up on with folks. I thought, oh, we can't be autistic because they also got speech delay. But it's the different variants within autism. And as we know, everybody is completely different in their presentation as we all are. Yeah. Yeah. What about like the social elements? Because that's, that's something that I think we haven't touched on. Like, how did I get on with other kids around that kind of early, early age? Okay. So one of the things you did, you were always a bit of a watcher. You would, you would kind of, a preschooler. I remember Mary St. to me always stands back and he watches and then he kind of copies and takes part. But you were always very wary. But what you did do, you were very gentle and lovely with all the children when you went to play group. But it was always learned responses and behaviors. So you would watch me with your brother and I was, if it was crying, I'd always go, oh, poor baby, poor baby. So whenever someone cried or anything else in settings, sort of outside the home, I would just go, oh, baby. I would kind of tap them, you kind of a really, it was a really learned response, but he dealt with it that way. So, it was like, early on, kind of four to five, you were really not sociable, but you would have friends, you would go to parties and... To be more of kind of the sidelines, kind of. Just observing and... On the sidelines observing. But it was just kind of... If somebody came to the house from a very early age, we had to say to Thomas, Thomas, stop. Say hi to Grandad or... Can you look? Say hi to whoever, because he would just look at the objects in the room and knock the people's. So we had to kind of do a lot of work on awareness, tell you what, really had a real attachment with being with me, and would really struggle if I would love the house. And I think that was just kind of... I guess it was unpredictable, because it was changed and so on. So I remember you saying about like Nana, like when I grew up, my grandma used to come around, I'd like shut the door on her and tell her to go back to her house. Well, you did, because I was going to work, so it meant change or somebody else was coming around. You'd say, you go your house like a mime. But Ronald Nana got the door closed on her, but she'd go to her house. Did she know much? Like, was she very like aware of that stuff, or was she just kind of... I think she struggled to understand it, because she would come in and say, I've got a surprise for you when you would go, oh, and you'd have a meltdown, because you didn't like surprises, you liked predictability. He liked to know exactly what you were doing, where you were going. But of course, people typically think she couldn't love surprises and you didn't. So that was a big difficulty really, but she got the kind of she loved you. So she got to know what you could cope with and what you could earn. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. So, yeah.