Reflecting

I was going through my "on this day" I'm Facebook and encountered this video that I made four years ago. 

Watching this stirs up so many emotions. 

First the obvious. Looking back at this video and watching my kids play four years ago, it melts my heart and brings up a tinge of sadness that the days of these two being three and one and a half are long gone. Sadness that I can never go back in time and relive these moments, and pain that they are gone. Pictures are hard enough to look at, but hearing that little boy's three year old voice, and watching them run around and be silly is so much harder, yet wonderful at the same time. 

Then there is the deeper level. At this point in our lives, I had been concerned for about a year at some of the things Naomi wasn't doing, and in my heart of hearts I knew she was autistic. That still terrified me because I didn't know what I know now. However, at that time I wasn't so acutely aware of the concerning things she WAS doing, and watching this I see signs screaming at me that I couldn't yet see. At this point in time I still allowed everybody to convince me my concerns were invalid and that she wasn't autistic. I hadn't found my mama voice yet, although I was just starting to in regards to her other medical conditions. It was still a few months after this that I really started researching and started pushing for answers, and it was six months later when she was first evaluated, and we were told while she tested autistic "technically", the doctor wasn't sure enough to diagnose a 25 month old. I left that appointment the way I had so many before, allowing somebody else to repress what I knew as truth (although looking back, I do agree with the psychiatrists decision to wait a year to be sure, as I left with him telling me to come back at three if I still had concerns). 

We have all come so far in our own ways. I've found my voice, and I will use it with every breath I have to advocate for my kids. Naomi is miles from where we were at this time. Notice in the video you only hear her voice twice, when T is pinning her and she whines ever so slightly and at the end when she said Bubba instead of bye. She was completely non-communicative at this point. We did occasionally get a word out of her, but it was typically not used correctly, as in this example. Most of the time she would only scream. Now she talks nonstop. That's just one example. She's a completely different kid, and she amazes me daily. 

I'm thankful for progress, but I'm equally thankful for small reminders like this video of exactly what that progress looks like. 

Like I said, so many emotions...