Who We Are
We're Daniel and Kristan Dow — Elijah's parents. Elijah was born on December 11, 2016. For seven minutes, he could not pull his own air. Then he made his first sound. He'd aspirated meconium. He spent his first days in the NICU.
The doctors gave us a list of things that might happen. Epilepsy. Developmental delays. Autism. They told us what to watch for — no eye contact, no smiling, no connection. Elijah looked right at us. He smiled. He laughed. He reached for our faces.
The speech came late. Small phrases when other children spoke in paragraphs. "Want milk" when his peers were having back-and-forth conversations. At three years old, after a speech therapy evaluation, came the diagnosis: autism spectrum disorder.
About the Book
He Feeds Dinosaurs is about what happened from that first breath to age nine. The birth injury. The NICU. The years of watching and waiting. The speech that didn't come. The patterns that emerged. The diagnosis. And everything that followed.
It's about a boy who narrates every door he walks past and lines up his toys in perfect rows he calls tunnels. It's about the gap between what the checklist says autism looks like and what you actually see when you're living it.
This isn't a medical guide or a parenting manual. It's a story — our story — written for the parents who are going through something similar, for the families who are still waiting on answers, and for anyone who wants to understand what it means when the diagnosis doesn't quite fit.
Why We're Sharing This
This book is about trying to understand what an autism diagnosis actually means. What does the label explain, and what doesn't it explain? We spent years working through those questions, and we're sharing what we learned for other parents navigating the same confusion — and for anyone who wants to understand what autism diagnoses mean and don't mean.
Through our YouTube channel and social media, we share videos and moments from Elijah's life. Not to speak for him, but to show who he is — funny, stubborn, brilliant in ways people don't always see, and entirely himself.