It was the realization that Lexi couldn't recognize people's faces that finally led us to have her tested for Aspergers. There should have been other indicators we noticed first, like the fact that she prefered to be left alone as a baby, or the three-hour-long meltdowns she had at three, or the vomitting-at-will, or the sensory reactions to hairdriers, vacuums, hand-blowers in public restrooms, tags in her clothes, or certain smells that made her cry. Maybe we should have known something was up when she turned her back on all the people in the room to flip through a pile of books, one page at a time, for an hour or more. At age one. What? We thought she was just super smart!
Or maybe it should have been the way she couldn't tell her friends or teachers apart.
Yeah, in spite of all the other stuff, it was that last part that would eventually get us. We'd thought it was just absent-mindedness. Maybe she was just REALLY bad with names? But after Ellie's diagnosis (and the thousands of pages of questions I'd had to answer) it became pretty clear that something was up with Lexi, too. From all my reading, I felt pretty certain it was Aspergers, but I wasn't sure if there was a point in having her tested for a while. She was happy, she had friends, and we were managing the sensory stuff. So maybe we'd keep going?
But then, almost by accident, I discovered that it wasn't just names. She didn't look at faces. She couldn't tell one face from another but was identifying people by other clues: hair color and style, height, body shape, location. It wasn't a very good system, but it was better than nothing. Because she really didn't know how to tell one face from the next.
So it was off to testing and yes, it was Asperger's Sydrome, thank-you-very-much.
That means a whole lot of things, but let's just start with the face thing. Not looking at faces much means not recognizing facial expressions, either. Are you happy? Sad? Worried? Curious? Angry? Don't expect Lexi to figure it out without being told (or being clued in some other way), because she won't. But there's more to it, too. If you don't watch other people's faces, chances are you don't think much about what you're doing with your own face. And that means that Lexi's face doesn't try to mimic what it sees all that much. In fact, she's often not aware of what signals her face is sending at all.
Case in point: this is Lexi's "I'm having the best time EVER!!" face. Seriously. When you take me off this horse I'm going to scream like you're dismembering me.
Knowing this, I thought I'd try a little experiment one day at lunch. I'd ask each of the older kids to make a face showing a certain emotion, take pictures, and compare. As expected, I could figure out what Spencer was showing me every time. Lexi was just as sure that she was making completely different expressions each time. And while she does have a variety of smiles, I'm pretty sure I couldn't identify the expressions without the labels. Could you? (Oh, and please forgive the food faces: they were eating pizza at the time when I quizzed them.)
Really interesting experiment! My conclusion: they are both adorable. =)
Posted by: Stephanie (Phil's girlfriend, ha) | April 06, 2011 at 12:59 PM