Sweeby asked me what was going on with my daughter so I'd thought I'd start a new thread about it instead of tagging onto my other one.

Sweeby, you said that kids with autism have problems making and keeping friends and you're right. Actually, D13 only has a couple of good friends, and there's only one of them that she really hangs out with. Even so, I do think she is slightly autistic and here are the things she does that makes me think so:

She starts talking out of the blue about something without explaining what she�s talking about. For example she'll say "They said the dvd player doesn't work" I'll have to ask her "What are you talking about? Who is THEY?" And this happens constantly.

She can't pick up on social cues: She asks her friends the same question over and over and can't tell that they're getting annoyed with her

Appears to lack empathy: A girl at school was upset because she had broken up with her boyfriend. Amber said "She'll get over it" and didn't understand why everyone got mad at her for saying that.

She's unable to recognize difference in speech tone and pitch, talks in a flat, monotone voice

For example she'll say thank you as if she's asking a question instead of making her voice go down at the end.

She doesn't show a lot of emotion either. She plays tennis and one day at tennis they had a raffle and she won a brand new tennis racket and tennis bag! She didn't get excited, she barely even smiled. She just said oh.

She's unable to understand jokes, sarcasm or takes things literally:

For example we were in the car listening to the radio. I said to her "Do you know the name of this song?"

She said "No."

So I started singing to her "Everybody wants to rule the world"

She said "They do?"

She has poor eye contact, does not like to be touched or hugged and didn't start talking until she was almost 4 years old.

Most of these things I started noticing in the past couple of years. These things didn't concern me too much at the time and I thought she would grow out of them but she didn't.

This past summer I took her to a doctor and he said she had ADHD. I met with the school psychiatrist and she said since she's getting good grades and there were no behavior issues at school there isn't much the school system would do. She said she would observe D13 while in school and get back to me. That was over a month ago. Since then I�ve been doing research about it on my own and that was when I started thinking that what D13 had was not ADHD but sounded more closely related to autism.

I'm still learning what my rights are as far as what I can make the school do and how to go about getting her even tested. I contacted the state disabilities board to get her tested for autism. It took two weeks to finally get in touch with the service coordinator who is supposed to schedule the testing. When I finally talked to her, she told me since I don't have a referral from a doctor or from the school stating they think she has autism, the state might not even consider her eligible for being tested for autism. In other words, she has to be tested to see if she qualifies to be tested for autism!

I'm meeting with the service coordinator this Thursday, and she will talk with me and my daughter to see if she qualifies to be tested for autism. Then it's a six month waiting period for the actual test. Then who know how long before she actually gets help.

WHEW!! So yeah, it's a lot of red tape to get through.

I've tried helping her as with her social skills much as I can, but I'm not a qualified professional trained in this field, there's only so much I can do.