Why so serious son? The signs!

Looking back on the first year of Armanno's life I quickly realized there were major signs that I missed. It's funny that the word Autism came out of my mouth when Armanno was only 5 months old. I started noticing this quirky thing that Armanno would do, when he was laying on his back he would twirl his fists in circles over and over again! I said to my husband omg do you think Armanno has autism. Being the hypochondriac I am I automatically looked into it, from the websites that I looked at I determined that he didn't. He would smile and he would make eye contact so he couldn't be autistic!
 As time went on and he reached the age of 7 or 8 months I noticed he didn't respond to his name when he was called. I remember thinking to myself do I not use his name enough? Do I call him bud too often, yeah that must be it! No big deal. I remember when people would call his name and he wouldn't respond, I would always say "oh he knows his name haha let me try, Armanno! Armanno! Armanno! Hey Armanno!, see there he goes he looked. At the time I didn't realize this was a sign. These sign started coming up more and more but none of them really stood out until I started researching a year later. 

For anyone who knows my extended family they know we like to carry on, make jokes and have a good laugh! Well anytime my family came around they got a great kick at how serious Armanno was! They use to say jeeze hard guy to get a laugh out of or he's so serious. You would always wonder what was going on in that little head of his because most times when you tried getting him to laugh he would look at you like you were crazy, granted that may have been the case with some of my family but it was thought provoking. I would have to take at least 100 pics in order to get one of Armanno smiling, you can imagine how many pics are on my computer! I felt guilty deleting the ones without smiles so I bought an external hard drive, no word of lie!

Yet another sign that I noticed but didn't think too much about. As Armanno got older these signs increased which increased my need to seek help.