Hello everyone, my name is David Daniels. I live in Norman, OK with my wife, 12 year old daughter and 8 year old son. I am originally from Las Vegas, NV, where I met my wife and our daughter was born 12 years ago. After some bad luck with jobs and living situations, we decided to move out to Moore, OK, so that my wife would be closer to her family. During the trip out here, my wife was complaining of stomach cramps. We took her to the ER the 2nd day after moving there, and to our surprise, found out that she was 7 months along with our son. We were ecstatic due to having 2 miscarriages while we were still in Vegas. He was born the following January 11th via C-section. He seemed to be hitting all of his milestones, and then, after his first birthday, his milestones hit a steep decline until they completely stopped. We researched and researched and got him a speech therapist from the state through a program called SoonerStart. After about three months of speech therapy, the therapist suggested we get help from Social Security, due to him having a general PDD-NOS semi-diagnosis. She and the testers that she worked with said that they couldn’t give him an actual diagnosis, but that Social Security would pay for formal testing so that he could have a proper diagnosis. April of 2008, after an hour long testing by a doctor selected by Social Security, we were given the diagnosis that we had heard of during our research and were praying that he didn’t have: Autism. Not only is he autistic, he is classified as a non-verbal autistic, meaning that at first he wasn’t talking at all, but now that he is talking, it’s 95% repeating things that he hears, not actual conversation that a now 8 year old would have with his parents, another adult, or even another child his age.

We were to get him a very good therapist that he still sees to this day. He also started