From 1 – 2 years of age is where I really started to worry, but the doctors kept reassuring me that everything was fine.  Nicholas was never into books, bedtime stories, etc.  He was still not pointing or really waving.  He did not care if anyone left the house, the room, the planet for that matter – I thought I was getting away with not seeing any separation anxiety.  Looking back, I can see how clearly he was in a world that was all his own.  Still not responding to his name.  At the 12 month mark, we tried to introduce milk – he hated it.  He would hand the bottle right back to me.  We tried strawberry milk, chocolate milk, you name it, he hated it.  I even crushed cheerios in a blender and added the milk and that didn’t fool him either.  We tried soy, lactaid, you name it – nothing worked.  When I started mixing 1 oz milk with 7 oz formula, that did the trick, but the poor thing was so constipated all of a sudden, that it took lots of prune juice to get him to go.  I gave up and switched to the Isomil 2 toddler formula.  I spoke to the pediatrician about him possibly being lactose intolerant or allergic to the milk; he blew me off.  Big surprise there.

He did well with feeding himself with a spoon.  His favorite foods were French fries, bananas, crackers, apples.  Much of this year is a blur to me – mainly because he was always moving, getting into everything – and I felt like a prisoner in my own home.  We stopped being able to go anywhere and take him with us – it became pure torture.  (“boys are very active, this is normal” – “welcome to the terrible two’s” – everyone told me.  Yeah, thanks.)

His babbling at some point slowed down to almost non-existant.  His babbling before sounded like actually baby talk sentences – we thought any day now, he’ll talk in full sentences.  I mentioned this to the pediatrician constantly and he told me to wait it out, boys usually explode with language around 2.  When we were home and he had stuff he was interested in, he was the best child in the world.  People always remarked about how quiet he was and how nicely he was playing.

He would pull his grandparents up into his room to play, sitting each one where he wanted them to sit.  Then he would play while they sat there, never involving them in his play.  We tried and tried to change the pulling into the word, “come” – but he would just grunt and pull.
Still, no toe-walking, no flapping – nothing to be worried about said the ped, even after I flat out asked about autism.