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When I was three years old, I started going to a church preschool. I was very unhappy there. I cried for five straight days, eight straight hours a day. The reason that I was unhappy there was because I had gone to the same babysitter’s house for three years and I was not used to going to a different place. Another reason I was unhappy there was because my babysitter’s granddaughter was supposed to go there and she could not attend that week because she was sick. At the end of the week, the preacher called my dad and told him that when he came to pick me up that they needed to talk. My dad came that afternoon and the preacher told him to pull me out of the church preschool. I started staying with a woman who was a grandmotherly type for the remainder of the year. I was very happy there. There were about four other children at her house besides me. I had a hard time communicating with some of them. The woman who kept me could not tell that something was wrong with me. The next year, I started staying with a woman who taught preschool at her house. My parents and my grandparents were starting to realize that something was wrong with me between age two and age three. My grandparents babysat me and my first babysitter’s granddaughter at my house a few times when my babysitter had another commitment. My parents had some close friends of theirs that brought their daughter to my house. I had a very hard time socializing with them. My parents took me to see my pediatrician in Roanoke, Virginia and he said that I was a late bloomer.

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