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2:34am September 20, 2014
turbulentbeauty asked: Hi, sorry this is a bit silly, but you mention your dad said "see the moon" as a baby. Why is that typical of autism? Apparently my first word was "hi" but around 18 months I developed extensive vocabulary and was obsessed with the moon! I asked "where did the moon go?" every day pretty much. If other autistic people are obsessed with the moon as kids that would be cool, but I feel like maybe that's not what you meant. haha.

My brother apparently asked a lot of questions about the moon at an early age, like “If the moon is orbiting the earth, what keeps it from falling down and hitting the ground?”  At the age of like… two or three.  He is autistic.

But the autistic thing about my dad’s words wasn’t exactly the moon part.  It’s a couple of things.  One, most babies learn to talk by babbling and then saying things like “mama” and “dada” as their first words – social things, things related to people.  Even many autistic people start out with words like that.

But autistic people often have a delay in speech, followed by suddenly speaking in complete sentences.  Or some start speaking in complete sentences even with no speech delay or regression.  This can be from echolalia or it can be from just skipping over all the preliminary stages of speech (or at least some of them) and landing at complete sentences without doing single words or phrases first.

So “See the moon” as your first words is very autistic because it’s not socially oriented words (like “mommy” and “daddy”), and because it’s starting in complete sentences while skipping over several developmental stages involving speech.  Not all autistic things involve being behind, some of them can involve being ahead, or skipping developmental phases altogether, or going through the phases in an unusual order.  My brother and I both went through a lot of developmental phases in the “wrong order” or in a very delayed way.  My father probably did too but I don’t know much about his early development and his parents are dead so they can’t tell us any more.