Sentimental Tripping

Well, I am currently on a mission.  My mission is to finish organizing all my photos and back everything up, but while on that mission, I ended up on another mission.  A mission I'll call "sentimental tripping" - in regards to the organization and dating of the photos of my oldest son.  Sentimental is for obvious reasons, tripping is for the journey through his 10-1/2 years of life.  Watching my child grow, develop and mature through photos has been a really neat experience.  
These aren't pics I haven't see before, I see them often, in their individual locations - but not together, in a chronological manner.  I can't wait to see what it looks like when I get the video completed containing all his pictures, my most precious memories of him.

His eyes are as big & brown and his eyelashes as perfect as they were the day he was born.  He has the cutest little "ski jump" nose and those perfectly lined lips that hold many many wets kisses.  I noticed something about him as I was taking this sentimental trip down Jerbie lane, he hardly ever smiled, he typically had an expressionless face.  It always seemed to me that he was a happy child, so in light of me noticing this,it made me sad.   Was there something else going on with him that I didn't know?  Should I have seen the warning signs for autism a lot sooner?  I don't know that back then, that I would have known what to look for or even what autism was.  The more I look back on his life, the more I see things that are unusual in his mannerisms and his obsessions and the white noise he loves so much.  He is as sharp as a tack and as smart as a whip, he's a very intelligent child.  Autism doesn't make him any less of a person or any less special than anyone else and it certainly does not define who he is as a person, but it does help explain a lot of what is going on in his head.  A beautiful child with a beautiful mind jarred by a very misunderstood disorder.  He is a wonderfilled little boy who owns my heart.  I fell in love with my son all over again during my journey of sentimental tripping.    

For my Jare - love always, Mom