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Sibling rivalry
I alluded to this in a random comment in some other thread, but having become so thoroughly educated on the symptoms and causes of autism, we started noticing things about Minifob's little sister that we never would have thought twice about otherwise (and indeed, didn't think twice about back when it was Minifob exhibiting the exact same behaviors...) As a sibling, she has a 10-30% chance of being autistic herself, depending on who you ask.
When we put her on the diet alongside Minifob--out of necessity, because otherwise he would swipe her unsafe foods--nothing really happened. But she's still breastfeeding, and in the week leading up to her vaccination, I decided to go ahead and put myself on the GFCF diet, just on the off-chance that it might help her fight off the disease in some small way. And she totally changed. She became more talkative and more playful, while before she was our quiet "observer" baby. And she almost completely stopped doing this odd little gesture she does when she's around people she doesn't know, where she sticks her arm up beside her face to physically hide from their view. It's not like she was exhibiting symptoms before--she has good eye contact, she smiles and interacts, she points, she says a handful of words. But these are all things that Minifob did too. And given how she responded to the diet, we started doing some other food challenges along the lines of things we've already discovered Minifob has mild behavioral and digestive problems with (nothing as severe as the gluten/casein reaction, but it's apparently quite typical for autistic kids to have lesser allergies as well.) Sure enough, I can get completely undigested food to come out in her poop, just like he has when he eats the wrong foods. So at the very least, I am convinced she has similar digestive problems, whether or not they are ultimately bad enough to affect her neurologically. We're now experimenting with giving her 1/4 doses of his enzymes to see if she improves the way he has.
At least group therapy sessions do offer discounts. I saw a special on Discovery awhile back that featured a woman with six autistic kids. What kind of person does it take to say, "Hmm, I have five autistic children, I think I'll pull the trigger one more time and see what happens?"
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