Munchausen by proxy, fieldnotes, and baby blogs

I had made a note about this in a sidebar that got lost. I started this blog last summer partly because we have friends and family in many different places and we're not very good at sending letters with pictures in them (ok, we've never done that), but mostly because we're both somewhat hypochondriac. As Peter grew and started to look and act less and less like a crying, flailing potato, I found myself thinking, "There, he's smiling. He's making eye contact. He's engaged." Not because these were milestones that he had reached before some other real or imagined baby, but because they were little bits of evidence that he didn't have autism. A few years ago, I read a feature on autism in the Globe that reported some expert's hypothesis that the remarkably high rate of autism in the Silicon Valley area was due to a concentration of nerd genes. More or less. So these fieldnotes on babykeeping were (are?) about having proof (if you write it down it's data) at some point in the future that Peter had smiled, made eye contact, occasionally volunteered appropriate words. I don't worry so much about it these days, but it's always in the back of my mind: what if something goes wrong? When does baby-strange become clinical-strange? Will I notice the difference? My heart breaks for those who know.