The Early Years

The Early Years
(the following is an excerpt from a book that I hope to publish in the future, please leave comments)



Chad was only three when we moved from a small fishing village, in Newfoundland, of two hundred and fifty people to a community in Alberta that had thirty thousand. We left family behind and set out for a new life in Fort McMurray. I remember thinking, as we approached the town, where have we moved! So many trees so far away from everything we knew, so isolated. I felt both sad and scared.

We stayed with my cousin and his wife’s family, a house full to say the least, it was good for us at the time, but we soon realized that we need our own home. Two months later we moved into our own apartment, we were home.



Soon after we moved into our new apartment I started seeing behaviours from Chad that I hadn’t seen before. From the time he was born until he got sick Chad was the perfect baby. He didn’t even go through the ‘terrible twos’, but since we moved Chad had been acting very strange. It started with tantrums, and I know that most people thought that was normal. What they didn’t know is that this was not normal for Chad. Another unusual behaviour was the screaming and holding his ears, and as I think of this I remember that this behaviour was happening before we moved. We tried time outs, and putting him in his room, but the behaviours just got worse. That fall we moved yet again, this time to be closer to my parents who had moved to the same community. It seemed that Chad was happier with my parents closer and us being settled once more, but the behaviours continued.