Ady’s Barracks – Sylas

Sylas is perfectly described as our carefree and wild child. He’s extremely intelligent and strong willed 4 year old with a laugh that can make anyone’s heart melt. As a baby, Sylas met every milestone with flying colors, speaking his first words at only 6 months and walking at 10 months! Although, once we turned 15 months we began to see his regression. What was once words became replaced with silence, precious eye contact was replaced with blank stares, and our completely content child became irritable and inconsolable at times.

Sylas became completely nonverbal and had ADOS testing at the age of 2 to confirm what we knew in our hearts, that he was on the spectrum.

We immediately began numerous therapies, but had little success because of his intense need to elope. Anytime he was put in a room, car seat, or high chair he couldn’t concentrate on anything other than to escape and run free. This lead us to in home therapy for a while to better suit his needs. We even moved 20 miles away to a house which had much more land as we previously lived in a subdivision with shared yards and a lake behind our house. For a while, the added acres were an absolute dream. Sylas had all the space he wanted to run free and be his complete wild true self. He even began speaking again shortly after he turned 3! He still has trouble expressing his needs but he can tell almost every single country just from looking at their flag! Although, we soon learned even with all this freedom he still had the urge to elope.

He does not understand boundaries or dangers no matter how hard we try to enforce them through learning and also “Sylas proofing” the house as we call it. The older he gets, the more his intelligence and problem solving skills progress and he’s mastered every lock and alarm we’ve installed to ensure his safety.

We’ve been considering fencing our yard for a while now but as we pay mostly out of pocket for medical bills and therapy, it’s not quite in our budget.

Just recently, Sylas was able to escape both my husband and I and run our 700ft driveway to the busy road we live off of unnoticed. Thankfully, the oncoming traffic spotted him and we were able to scoop him up within seconds but this has us rattled and sick.

Everything we do is to ensure safety, happiness, and wellbeing for our children and a fence around our property would be able to provide that fail safe for us.

We’ve been extremely limited with our time spent outside because of the flight risk and it wears heavily on our family as we also have a younger daughter who loves to be outside as well. It’s almost as if our house has become a prison with no outdoor freedom.

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