During the month of April in honor of Autism Awareness/Acceptance Month I am going to post a picture showing our autism. Autism is a spectrum. When you know one child with autism you know one child with autism. This is our autism.

Without words…as I have shared before Courtney is considered non-verbal. Though as of recent she is using verbal language more and more every day. There is one other thing that gets in her way though. It’s called Apraxia. In short, Apraxia if speech is when a person’s brain is not communicating properly with the oral motor muscles which in turn makes it very difficult for a person to speak clearly. So when Courtney does talk it’s usually in single words and she is very difficult to understand to most people especially when out of context.

So as exciting as it is to hear her words, she is still very dependent on her talker to communicate her wants and needs. We forgot to charge Courtney’s talker last night so we sent the charger to school with her so they can charge it some. School forgot to send the charger home and the talker died. So tonight Courtney was without words. It quickly became quite the reminder that without her talker she is basically without the ability to express her wants and needs. Her dad put it perfectly after telling him the talker is dead. His comment was, “so she has no words tonight. How will we know what she wants?” This is our autism.