My son's seventh birthday celebration was a significant one. I invited a few of my family most especially some of his cousins, most of whom he had never met and of course my parents his grandparents. I should say I come from a large family so he does have a lot of cousins, first and second,  most of whom he was completely unaware of due to his mother banning any of my family entering into our lives, for her own reasons of insecurity.

It was the first of his birthdays were it appeared he fully embraced the concept and seemed to also fully understand what was going on. He opened his presents with glee, he did need prompting to thank the givers,  but soon got the hang of that also. He was fascinated to discover he was related to all of these people having spent the first five years of his life totally unaware of any family other than his parents and his mother's sister and mother. He also asked me if he could invite three boys from his class at school. This was the first time he had had any other children of his own age in his house they played well together.  One of the boys in particular,  my son was enthralled by,  almost like a boy crush. The boy in question was very understanding of this adulation and showed a good insight into my sons autism.  My son stuck like glue to this boy following him around and mimicking him and repeating his name over and over, eventually it got too much and the three boys made them selves scarce and fled to my sons bedroom while I entertained him and introduced  him to his other guests. A little over two hours was about his limit then he started to get extremely hyper the guests,  bless them all, recognised this and began to leave. I could tell it was going to take a few hours of quiet time before my boy had processed everything that had happened that day. A great day though.

Strangely or maybe not so, the next day he virtually ignored all of his presents almost as if the opening of them was all he was interested in. Some of them stayed in their plastic wrapping never to be explored, ending up eventually in our local charity shop. When we first arrived in Scotland he was given some mega blocks from my sister, her children had long exhausted their fascination. Even now six years on he still plays with these bricks, he first made a robot (called Plessy), he would first build it with green bricks then gradually change the bricks to red ones then yellow and so on. He could not go to bed unless in his eyes the robot was complete and woe betide anybody who tidied the bricks away while he was sleeping. He then developed a method of making the bricks into rudimentary shapes of band members,  usually Queen,  and he would do this while watching a DVD of them preforming and as the bands image changed, from song to song,  so did his brick representation of them, utterly fascinating. Other toys have held his interest most recently a magic set, but the popularity of the bricks prevails,  time and time again he returns to them as they seem to be the best way he can express what he is feeling about what it is he is most interested in, which is most often a musical performance of some kind ...