Cara Faus knew that something was wrong by the time her daughter was only four months old. Her baby wasn't making eye contact with anyone, ever, and still wasn't rolling over. Cara and her husband kept checking for baby developmental milestones in the coming months, and started to worry, but they also didn't want to be hasty: everyone knows that babies grow on their own timetables. They hoped that their daughter would soon begin developing more “typically,” or at least more happily, and acquire the skills that people take for granted in “normal” children, like playing.
And anyway, there was _some_ forward progress, and _some_ development. They don't call autism a “learning disability” and a “spectrum disorder” for nothing. Katie (not her real name) finally began crawling at 13 months, and still wasn't playing with talking sounds like other babies. But still, again, some kids talk later, and walk later... How can you possibly be objective about one unique child? Cara found that she finally had to look at the whole picture, in order to notice that it wasn't just a physical milestone which was missing or one issue with her daughter's speech that was concerning, but there was rather an entire developmental breakdown manifesting itself in her child's unique set of symptoms.
