The Second Year

At 14 months he took his first wobbly independent steps. He had been a fast and agile crawler since 6 months, having first stood with support at 11 months, I heaved a sigh of relief when he walked. He started to really speak words at 15 months. From the age of 9 months or so he had started to recite the alphabet by memory (I think from watching Sesame Street on TV) and was becoming quite verbal. Not long after his sister was born at 17 months, he had to spend a few days in hospital with severe tonsillitis. With his young baby sister, he was fairly tolerant and independent, a little jealous which was to be expected with a new arrival in the home. However, his crying (screaming!) tantrums got worse and worse - lasting for a couple of hours at a time - which at the time I put down to his being stressed due to changes in the household. About this point in time I requested a referral to a Paediatrician to assess him for his temper tantrums and head banging. The doctor was most sympathetic and was able to observed such a tantrum in his office, shocked by it, but unable to offer anything more than sympathy! Not long after Brandon had turned 2 it became obvious that he was developing somewhat unevenly. His motor skills seemed on par with what was normal for his age group, but his social and speech skills took a sharp nose-dive. I noticed that he was becoming more indifferent to social contact with me and other family members, and was quite an "irritable" child who was easily upset and overly fussy, showing definite obsessive-compulsive type behaviours (although these had been first noticed by the age of 12 months, when he received his first train set - the first of many to come!). Where his speech had been developing at a steady pace, soon after his second birthday, he just seemed to stop talking. He regressed back to one or two word sentences and seemed to "lose" that which he had learnt. Then he started stuttering. A referral to a Speech Therapist revealed "severe" stuttering - I was to learn that he was 6 months delayed in speech development. I feel that this was due to the stuttering impeding his progress. About this time also, I noticed that Brandon was not making direct eye contact - I felt that he was looking over my shoulder or right through me. He was also staring off into space a lot, as though in his own world, right in the middle of any number of activities, eating, playing etc. He stepped back when I or family members and friends went to hug him. If we were able to hug him, he would stiffen up and not reciprocate. This continued well into his third year. Towards his second birthday, whilst in the car with his Family Day Care Mum, he suffered a grand mal epileptic fit. The Paediatrician and I had wondered if the staring off into space spells were a type of petit mal or absence seizure. He also had one "drop-attack" where he just fell to the floor dazed and limp with no prior warning. Follow up with 2 EEG´s showed no abnormalities, but he was commenced on Tegretol (Carbamazepine) a while later after much trepidation of using medication. I was not too worried about the fits, but more concerned about his behaviour at night - for over 2 years he would continue to wake up nightly screaming, distraught and locked in a night terror, unarousable from his distress. The Paediatrician put it down to an "irritable brain". The Tegretol did not help him with settled sleep as we had envisaged (drowsiness is a side effect). What we did notice was a marked increase in his stuttering, which after 6 months of intensive speech therapy, had only remained in a residual capacity.