Today is Sunday (or at least it was when I first wrote this!) which means it is match day. Having 2 girls and no real interest in football myself I never imagined I would be spending cold Sunday mornings cheering on my daughter from the side lines. Victoria has a few hobbies typical of...
E is for Echolalia
You learn many new words on the autism journey and Echolalia is one we now know very well. Echolalia is the repetition (or echoing) of sentences back to you when responding to a question or situation, and it is something Victoria does repeatedly. It can be a cause of a lot of frustration (for...
D is for Diagnosis
I was going to write something else today, but this morning I got chatting to a lady about autism who asked how we got a diagnosis for Victoria, how did we know to even try to get a diagnosis and what did the diagnosis mean for us, so I thought that would be a...
C is for Causes and Cures
Put simply, we do not know exactly what causes autism. It is likely to be genetic and may be hereditary but as yet the evidence of a gene or genes responsible for autism hasn’t been found. Although we don’t know the causes, we do know what doesn’t cause autism: vaccines. In 1998 Andrew Wakefield...
B is for Beams
We Are Beams is a local charity based in Hextable, Kent. I say “charity” but what I really mean is “a vital social service that receives no government funding”. It is a scandal that society has to rely on charities to function but given that I can’t change the system I can at least...
A is for Autism
As I have already mentioned on my homepage, this site was born out of a desire to not only raise funds for We Are Beams by gathering sponsorship for taking part in their Fire Walk on 26th March 2022, but also from wanting to normalise the conversation around autism. I strongly believe that many...