Ok, here goes. I was born about 3 weeks early, weighing in at 5 lbs and 9 oz. My mom smoked during her pregnancy and it was a difficult labor. Her water broke 24 hours before I was born and they had to induce labor.

From the time I was a year old my parents thought that something was wrong with me. I did not speak until I was 2 1/2 years old and when I was little ,I acted very withdrawn. I still am very shy. My mom used to have to hold my head up so I would listen to her.They even got my hearing tested because they thought I was hard of hearing. Turns out my hearing is fine and so is my eye sight.

As an infant, I was very alert ( I saw my baby pics and in a few it ACTUALLY looks like I am in deep thought). In other pictures, I am laughing or smiling. I was not very cuddly and would not even let my family hold me sometimes. My mom said that I was very noise sensitive and did not take to strangers.

From a very young age, I would rock my body, flap my hands or fingers, have motor tics, repeat words, and act out if we were in a crowded place.

I have a short term memory problem.. however I am good at remembering birthdays, important dates, and have always been good at math because numbers interest me. I have even been obsessed with numbers. I have been superstitious in the past and even had a lucky number: 11.

I have never been good at small talk or relating to people my age. From 1st grade to fourth grade, I had a few close friends but I have never been good in large groups. I have always been good with adults, as long as they had a sense of humor and were patient and kind and understanding. I was not too much of a discipline problem until fifth grade. In my earlier years, I was very quiet ( unless I am angry), daydreamed a lot, could be very obsessive, and had trouble following directions.My intelligence is at least average but I was in LD classes in the first grade. I have always been clumsy and have trouble learning new games. Gym class was a nightmare.

I have always had an explosive temper. Until I reached puberty, I was not too moody. I could get angry very easily but get over it very fast and not let it ruin my entire morning, day, or afternoon. Most of the time I was happy except for when I did not get my way. I hated being told no or told what to do and would throw a tantrum. My dad would give in a lot so I learned that if I cried enough or screamed loud enough I could get what I want. I was a LOUD screamer. I was more active than my mom's other 5 kids. I had a rocking horse and would ride that from morning to night. I would ride several hours a day and not get tired. I would get up at 2 am and ride it.

To this day I can get on a certain kick and that is ALL I will talk about. It drives my mom nuts.I repeat things, I can have bizarre thoughts, I count things like the number of tiles on the bathroom floor or the number of books on a book shelf, I can total up numbers like 46 times 23 easily in my head.

I can hyperfocus like you wouldn't believe. I can work on a web page 10 hours straight and only get up to go to the bathroom or get a drink. In hyperfocus mode, I don't even eat and I can forget to take the dog out. Chores don't get done. The house could be on fire and it might take a few minutes to notice.

More info: I am ambidextrous, I am 31 but look like I am about 15 or 16 ( I have a round "baby" face), I have trouble doing things in the right order, and I prefer reading nonfiction over fiction. I love libraries and will study for fun. ( sounds nerdish but true). I can get so interested in something I can become an expert on it. I will stay up all night on the internet just to learn about my "pet" interest.

I love to make lists, too.

Does this sound like aspergers or something else?

Jett;

With all of that there is definitely something going on. What you need to ask yourself now is; "Do I need the diagnosis?".

If you do feel you need a diagnosis, you ought to print your posting out and take it to your doctor and talk it over with him/her.

Alternatively, you may wish to find someone specializing in this kind of thing...

ME :D

Just out of curiousity, where does one draw the line between Asperger's and ADHD?

Reading the "archetypically ADHD" posts, they describe me very well, with the losing things and missing assignments and being completely disorganized and forgetting tasks and such, and then I read something like this where it also describes a lot of things from when I was little.

My mom said that I was very noise sensitive and did not take to strangers.
I've always hated loud noises, which is doubly odd because I'm deaf in one ear, loud noises shouldn't be a problem.

I had a rocking horse and would ride that from morning to night. I would ride several hours a day and not get tired. I would get up at 2 am and ride it.
Ditto, also swings. I could sit on a swingset all day...even throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Something about the repetitive back and forth motion. I hate rollercoasters and stuff like that, so it's not the speed or the height, and despite the fact that I get seasick easily in other situations, the repetitive back and forth motion of a swing was the only thing that could make me completely calm and relaxed until I started taking Adderall. I also used to sing all the time out on my swingset. Sometimes songs I'd heard on the radio, but often just...I don't know, music from my head, I guess. Again, probably related to the rythmic swinging. This was a fairly common occurrence up through, I don't know, 3rd grade, maybe? I can't remember when we got rid of the swingset...maybe it would have gone through 4th or 5th grade, I don't know. I'd just spend all afternoon swinging back and forth and singing. Usually it was just wordless music, even when it was a song I'd heard before, I wouldn't sing the words, just the melody line.

I have a short term memory problem.. however I am good at remembering birthdays, important dates, and have always been good at math because numbers interest me. I have even been obsessed with numbers. I have been superstitious in the past and even had a lucky number: 11.
Same here with the short term (and prospective memory) problems, couldn't remember when an assignment would be due or when I had an appointment for something, or where I'd left an item, but I could remember stuff I'd read perfectly, and could remember conversations and events that had taken place years ago. With math, it's odd...I've generally not been very good at it, the only test scores that have ever been average for me, IQ or ITBS or any of the standardized testing things, were certain math computation scores. On the other hand, I skipped a few years of math for some reason (now that I think about it, one of those average ITBS scores was from the 7th grade ITBS testing, and in 7th grade I was taking (and nearly failing) high-school algebra, having been skipped out of 7th and 8th grade math.)

As for favorite numbers, I don't know if I ever had a favorite number, but I do remember as a child wanting to have an even number of food items for some reason. That and eating food and wanting to make sure that there was an even number of bites so that I could chew an equal number of times with each side of my mouth. I also remember staying home sick back in third grade, and figuring out a pattern for tapping the fingers of my hand (other than my thumb) in such a way that no finger would tap right after the one next to it, and still tap my fingers in that order to this day, just out of force of habit.

I count things like the number of tiles on the bathroom floor or the number of books on a book shelf, I can total up numbers like 46 times 23 easily in my head.
Well, I don't have the attention span to go counting things like that, but if I'm hearing something, like a tapping sound or whatever, I'll subconsciously be counting the number of times it's happened, like hearing each tap as a number. Now, having spent years as a musician, you'd think that I'd hear it as the 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 like a musician would, but it's different, it's just continually rising count. It's not a conscious thing or anything, and I'm not trying to keep track of the number of times, because lord knows if that if I'd actually tried I'd have quickly lost or forgotten the count.

I can hyperfocus like you wouldn't believe. I can work on a web page 10 hours straight and only get up to go to the bathroom or get a drink. In hyperfocus mode, I don't even eat and I can forget to take the dog out. Chores don't get done. The house could be on fire and it might take a few minutes to notice.
Yeah, or back in the days before the web, reading books and being so caught up in what I was reading as to not even notice if someone was talking to me or anything that was going on around me at all. That was one reason why it took so long before anyone suggested ADHD, because my parents would always point out that I could sit still for hours on end with a book.

I love libraries and will study for fun. ( sounds nerdish but true). I can get so interested in something I can become an expert on it. I will stay up all night on the internet just to learn about my "pet" interest.
Well, when friends of mind in college were getting into drugs, I learned everything I could about neuropharmacology, and then with the ADHD diagnosis, I learned everything that I could about the rest of neurochemistry and neuroanatomy and how neurological function interacted with behavior.

And then there was the time that I was locked out of my room and had a few hours to kill before my roomate came back to the apartment to let me n, so I picked up her old undergrad biology textbook (well over a thousand pages) and pretty much taught myself biology just for the hell of it.

I read Hawking and Krause and other physicists back in middle school, but that wasn't to learn about physics so much as to see if what I'd already figured out on my own was correct (I love how it took Hawking so long to think of time as a plane instead of a one-dimensional line, when it should have been blatantly obvious from even a cursory understanding of Heisenberg, although I dislike how he named the other time dimension "imaginary time," but I digress).

One question for you, though...are you a picky eater? There are only a few foods that I like to eat, and if you add in an ingredient I don't like, I won't want to eat the entire thing. Even when there are foods that I like, I don't like them if they're not cooked a certain way. Certain food smells turn me off, but also certain colors or types...tomatoes, for some reason, disgust me, as does pasta, even though I love rice, which should be almost the same thing. And even with rice, I really like Asian-style "sticky" white rice, but I can't stand the American rice. Most vegetable and almost all fruits except apples and bannanas just aren't appealing (and despite liking apples, I don't like pears)...and it's not a taste thing with that...I like orange or lime or strawberry flavored things, but I don't like to eat strawberries or limes or oranges (thank g_d for vitamin pills). Corn on the cob yes, but not otherwise...when I was younger, I used to love frozen peas, but if they were cooked, I didn't like them. I still remember a babysitter cooking peas, and I refused them, and she didn't understand why I would eat them frozen but not cooked, and kept trying to get me to eat them and I just didn't want to.

Actually, I remember that issue coming up a lot when I was younger, babysitters or teachers or others yelling at me because I didn't want to eat something. Obviously not so much of an issue as an adult, and I cook a lot, so I can cook things the way that I want to eat them.

The thing is, I don't know that I'd consider any of this to be a disorder, inasmuch as it doesn't cause impairment...ADhD, on the other hand, caused huge impairments in my life, as it really sucks to know enough about a subject to teach the class but failing out because you forgot to do any of the work and didn't know when the papers were due and didn't turn in any assignments, but aced the final exam in like twenty minutes after showing up a half hour late. Also, chicks really don't like messy rooms and cars full of trash.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't know if diagnoses are necessary for something like that. It's more of a personality trait issue, rather than a disability or disorder issue...and also, Adderall takes care of the attention and organization and prospective memory and making inappropriate comments stuff, but it doesn't change the picky eating habits or the counting sounds, or just randomly tapping out rythms or hearing music in my head or the enjoyment of swingsets; the former caused serious problems in my life, the latter are just quirks. Although...the Adderall does give me the ability to talk without lecturing, or at least without sounding like I'm lecturing...but part of that is probably just having the attention span to notice that people don't like being lectured to. It also allows me to pretend to be more normal...athough every now and then I'll slip up, like when I wound up getting into a fairly detailed discussion of neurology and neuropharmacolgy with one of the nurses at work...and she and the other nurse were a little surprised that a poli-sci major would know those things.

It's just more like set of personality quirks that add some flavoring to the ADHD...although I have a 10 year-old cousin with an official diagnosis of ADHD and Aspergers for whom it's significantly more than flavoring (but then again, I was a lot like him at that age...he even looks almost identical to my old photos). But like I said, if it's not causing a problem in your life, it's probably not worth worrying about. When I first read about this stuff, I stayed up all night reading about it and trying to learn as much as I could (of course)...but now sometimes I actually have difficulty reading about it simply because it just feels...eery, I guess, for some reason....I don't know.

Jett.
You should get assessed for either Aspergers or Sensory Integration Disorder but I'd say you're more likely to have mild Aspergers (the hand and finger flapping are usually symptoms of ASD)...not that I'm a doctor but seriously I suggest you go to a doctor that specialises in Aspergers

Take Care
Selena

I'm reading a book you might find interesting called The ADHD Autism Connection written by the mother of an ADHD, ADD, and Aspergers/ADHD child. The symptoms checks lists have a lot of over lap. Some suggest that ADHD might be a part of the same spectrum (probably a milder form) than Aspergers. I don't have an opinion yet, I'm still learning about this stuff.


Scattered

First I agree with the notion Speedo brought up why bother with a DX
of aspergers if your 31.

ADHD is often comorbit with autism spectrum disorders.
Here is what I have read to help tell if you have one or the other
and I guess both.

First personality types INTP,INTJ are very common with aspergers. I'm
INFP and I am highly likely have Asperger(hell on an online test I scored
182 out of 200) *N*P is very common with ADHD. I have inattentive ADD.

online test:
http://www.rdos.net/eng/


ADHD == high novelty seeking (needing to entertain your brain often)

ASD == low reward dependence (I take that as can enjoy certain task for
no clear reason outside of ones own self)

Oh know my ADHD just kicked in this is all your getting........

I have a son with aspergers and husband and Mom likely too.

It looks like to me and if you want a definite diagnosis, see psychologist who is aware what it is. You may see your doctor for a referral.

Once you understand they whys of things, frustrations of yesterday will all be understood.

I hope you get the answers you deserve.

Take care.