coilla

oh, I know that pain, and I am sorry. My oldest daughter started speech therapy at the age of 18months, and was just recently released at the age of 10. We now know she is on the autism spectrum. She was 3 before she started verbalizing anything, and those were small words, not sentences yet. It was another year or two before we got simple sentences like "I love you". The hardest part for me, is now. She has a baby brother who is exploding with language and when he started to say "Mama" and "Daddy" she asked me when she first said that and I had to explain to her that when she was younger she didn't say anything at all and that she was 4 or 5 before she was able to say "mama" and "daddy" and it was heartbreaking to have to tell her that.

I did PACE, at least I think it was PACE, it was years ago and I don't remember. But we had no teachers, we had monitors, we taught ourselves, graded our own work, and it was highly religious.....the school I attended was attached to the church I attended, so very small and everyone knew each other and attended the same church. I was moved to public school my 7th grade year. I loved every minute of not being at the private school anymore. For one thing, no more uniforms. I think it shaped me because I am a very slow reader and I didn't enjoy reading books until I was in HS and someone started introducing me to books I was interested in. The school I attended would only allow us to read approved christian material, I read about horrific deaths of christian martyrs in 4th grade. That is not really something I wanted to be reading =) I also have everyone I know now tell me I grew up in a box because I get no cultural references from when we were kids because I went to this school/church and had no TV and was only allowed to listen to certain types of music and watch certain movies and blah blah blah. Was it the same for you?