You're making some really big adjustments right now - in a lot of different aspects of your life. As you say, Michael is suddenly talking more and you're understanding what he's saying a lot of the time - THAT is a BIG adjustment for you because the whole foundation of your "relationship" with him has suddenly changed. It's a change for the better, but STILL a BIG change. With non-ASD kids, they pick up language so gradually that we, as parents, find it easier to adjust our way of treating them and communicate with them as they grow. In addition, with ASD kids, we still can expect to sidelined by huge misunderstandings because of sensory differences. So, at times, we go back to wondering if we understand our kids at all.

My son's development was always in "fits and spurts" and it seems that we went from chaos to catastrophe to chaos all the time, with the odd peaceful break in between. We would go for ages and ages with seemingly no progress, then BOOM, all of a sudden he became an "expert" in things overnight and my husband and I had to scramble just to keep up. I often said it seemed like he had "no learning curve" but a "learning cliff face" and once he worked out from the ground where the handholds were, he would just scramble to the top in one big go.