When my first son was born, everything seemed fine. In fact, he appeared to progress normally until he turned about three, when his development slowed down to a crawl.
No matter what I said to the military pediatricians, first at one duty station, then at another, I was consistently brushed off as worrying too much over the only child I had. It wasn't until he was nearly ready to begin school that we discovered that he is autistic. Nowadays there would have been intervention much earlier, but this was the early 1980's, when autism was only beginning to be recognized as a spectrum disorder.
Well, autistic or not, my firstborn has always had a peculiar quirk--he seems to know things in advance.
As a preschooler, he would casually tell me when someone was coming to the door before they knocked and without being able to see them through a window. There was also the time his father (now my ex) was injured on a jump (he was in the airborne) the phone rang and he said "Daddy," as if he was talking to him. Since his father was as I thought at the time on a field training exercise, I blew it off until I picked up the phone. Yes, it was my other half, calling for me to come and get him from the hospital, he'd hurt his ankle on the previous night's jump which was the start of the field problem.
I guess the most unusual incident, though, was the day I was sitting on the couch with him and he reached over and began to pat my abdomen. I asked him why and he answered, "Baby."
"Baby?" I asked.
"Baby," he replied firmly. "Tiny baby in there."
Well, he was five years old at this time, and I had been using no form of contraceptives since he was almost two, so I thought he had a great imagination. I stood up, and he threw his arms around me and said. "Hugging tiny baby."
It was about two months later that I discovered that I was, indeed, about 12 weeks pregnant with the child who would be his younger brother.
When discussing this with a friend of mine, she simply shrugged and said it was no surprise to her.
"JP," she said, "is very special. He isn't troubled by logic or our conceptions of reality. People like him are really between two worlds."
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When I was a kid, only 3-4, in my old house, I had a dream that my mom had a baby, and I could see one of the spare bedroom all dressed up in pink, and in my dream, my mom said, "It's a girl!" And she gave me the baby to hold.
2 weeks later, my mom said she was going to have a baby. And it turned out to be a girl (but we didn't find out until my mom gave birth, she wanted it to be a surprise).
But the weirdest part was that the same exact room (in my dream) became the baby's room. And we had 3 spare rooms at the time, so it could have been any.
I only have two memories from that age, one when I was in California, and two, when I had that strange dream.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.