No Clothes

My son has some sort of vendetta against wearing clothes. Whenever he gets home from school, the first thing he does is strip off all his clothes so that he can run around the house. Even when he sneaks out into the back yard he doesn't bother putting on any clothes.

We have a super tall fence and the neighbors aren't nosy so I don't worry about it too much except that he does it even when it is really cold or really hot outside. I don't really want him to get sick or sunburned and it is sometimes quite scary. If I dress him before he goes out then I just find his clothes scattered around the yard, which makes it quite a pain to keep them clean.

He especially hates to wear socks. When we go to the store, for example, he will allow us to dress him, but if we put socks on him then by the time we get out of the car he will have removed his socks, though he does put his shoes back on his bare feet. I really have no idea why he hates his socks so much. Maybe he gets sweaty feet. This is just one of those things that I would really like him to be able to explain to me so that I can understand.

Introducing My Boy

I have a little boy who is now 5. He is autistic (pretty obvious from the blog title). I wanted to introduce him here since this is the first post. Naturally I’ll keep his name anonymous because after all he will grow up and the internet has a way of making things permanent.

We discovered his autism quite early on. At first we thought he had a hearing problem because he simply didn’t respond when we called his name. He would just keep going and going. Well, three hearing tests later we finally convinced someone that it might be something else. A bunch of tests later they said autism.

For a run of the things that he does differently, let me just go over a few of them.

At 5 and a half he is just now beginning to talk. By this I mean he said “mommy” and “daddy” for the first time just two months back, and he still doesn’t say them very often. He knows words for the foods he likes but we still have to encourage him to use his words.

He is not potty trained (still working on this one)

He does not come when called.

He does not keep a “normal” sleep schedule.

He is hyper-active nearly all the time (he runs and jumps constantly).

He hates wearing clothes.

He likes to play with gooey, soft objects such as mud and especially make big messes with them.

We love our boy and hope that he can overcome the challenges that he faces.