The beginning.

When our daughter *Ella was born 12 years ago, we thought life couldn’t get any better.
She was such a placid, gentle and happy baby. Slept through the night at 6 weeks and grew into a beautiful toddler and completely captured our hearts.

Roll on 3 and a half years and our 1st precious son *Harley was born. He was a gorgeous looking baby, perfectly formed but my mother’s gut instinct told me that he was very different. Special but different.

And we were still years away from finding out exactly what made him so unique.
He had silent reflux which is like regular reflux with the difference being that he never vomited. The reflux would just sit in his little throat and cause him enormous discomfort and the poor little thing was in constant pain. He barely slept and was miserable most of the time.

As he started to grow up  I became very aware that he wasn’t showing any interest in peoples faces and wasn’t interested in interactive games at all.
When he was only 14 months old I was diagnosed with a 5cm acoustic neuroma which is a benign brain tumour and had to have a 13 hour surgery to remove it.The Doctors I had seen previously regarding *Harley dismissed all of my concerns about him saying that my tumour had clouded my judgement and that he was completely fine.

It wasn’t discovered that *Harley had autism until he turned 4.

I completely lost the hearing in my right ear due to the tumour and 9 months after that surgery, I had a corneal transplant to restore my vision in the opposite eye that was blind from an unrelated condition that I’d had since birth.

So once again, I was leaving my child alone. It took me years to stop blaming myself for this.
3 months later I found out that I was pregnant with our 3rd child *Lucas and immediately started to panic.

The OBs told me that due to my previous recent head surgeries, I wasn’t allowed to give birth naturally and that because our baby had been exposed in-utero to MRI’s, x-rays(my lungs collapsed during the brain surgery) and radioactive injections, that our baby would most likely have birth defects or I would miscarry. Thankfully, our 3rd child and 2nd son *Lucas was born perfectly formed and only weeks later,*Harley his older brother was finally diagnosed with high functioning autism.

*Lucas was diagnosed with aspergers when he turned 3 himself  and is currently in an early intervention pre-school and is thriving.

This blog is my outlet when autism starts to consume me, my personal venting post and also the place where I rejoice in the daily achievements of my  beautiful family.
I feel enormously blessed by what God has entrusted me with and know that he is continually flooding me with the grace that I need daily.
So Welcome to Wonderfully Wired

* The children’s names have been changed to protect their identities .