Our Asperger's Story - the Early Years Part 1

Our Asperger's story started well before we knew what it was. Our
daughter Jess was finally diagnosed as having Asperger's Disorder when
she was 13. We had put up with years of anti-social behaviour from
Jess and agonised over the bullying she endured and her apparent
inability to make friends.
This was our precious daughter. We were so proud when she was born. We
already had a 3? year old son, Matt and our family was now complete
with a pigeon pair.
From a young age, Jess was incredibly self-contained and would
entertain herself for ages. Matt needed constant entertaining whereas
Jess would spend hours playing quietly with great focus.
When she commenced pre-school at 3 years of age, it started to become
apparent that she was somewhat different. She had an extensive
vocabulary which she was able to use pretty much in context. We
thought it was funny, this tiny little thing with a cute pageboy
haircut coming out with these big words. It kept a lot of people
amused. Not so funny was the realization that she was not interacting
well with the other kids. She didn't really make any friends and
wasn't asked to play over at others houses like most of the kids. On
the occasional times that she did go over to other people's homes, she
didn't really want to play with the children but went into her own
little world and played with their toys. This was no doubt quite
frustrating for the would-be friends not to mention their parents. She
would not make eye contact when speaking and still to this day finds
it difficult to do so....

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