By HELEN COMPSON

THE first thing you notice about two-and-a-half year old Angelo is his big, happy smile.

His inquisitiveness, his natural energy and his utter absorption in today’s kiddy-must-see, Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom, are close seconds.

It’s only once we’ve all settled down and the flurry of my entrance is over that you start to see the signs that first began to worry his mother 18 months ago. The rhythmic bouncing. The flapping of his hands. The lack of eye contact. And the seeming unawareness of anyone else’s presence.

“Because I’d not had a baby before, because Angelo is my first, I didn’t know what they were signs of,” said Natasha.

“One of my friends kept saying to me ‘why does he do that hand flapping?’

“She was trying to tell me without saying it, but I was quite defensive and just said ‘every child does that’, until she finally said ‘my niece does that and she has autism’.”

Google and the NHS website cemented Natasha and husband Andreas’s fears – Angelo was, indeed, displaying many of the signs of autism. “Apart from the bit about not smiling, because he was a very happy, smiley baby even at seven or eight months old,” she said.

“But it all clicked into place – I recognised what I was reading.”

Natasha is now in the process of launching a new playgroup in Hexham for special needs children because, as she’s found, your bog standard gathering of mums and toddlers can be soul destroying for those struggling to come to terms with the different direction their own lives have taken.

“You can feel so alone,” she said. “Going to playgroup or soft play can really upset me, when I see other children playing normally. I’m in tears sometimes.”

She refers to a homily called Welcome to Holland, by Emily Perl Kingsley, in which the person who’d got on the ‘plane expecting to go to Italy lands in Holland instead. It’s a slower pace of life with less bells and whistles, but actually, it still has a lot to offer too.

As Natasha says, sharing that unexpected journey with others will turn it into a road more easily travelled.

The new group, christened Little Lights (“as little lights can shine brightly”), will start on May 2 and take place every Tuesday morning thereafter, from 10am till 11.30am, in Hexham Community Centre.

Any child with special needs, not just autism, and their parents/carers will be welcome.

Angelo received his official diagnosis in September last year, two months before his second birthday. But by then, Natasha had already got over the worst of the panic that had consumed her when a health visitor she pressed to acknowledge her fears reluctantly admitted she did see the signs too: “I think I went into meltdown then”.

With no family in Hexham but close to Andreas’s mother, she rang her mother-in-law in tears: “I said ‘I’m coming to live with you in London’. It’s only me and Andreas up here and I needed family around me.”

The following 18 months was a blur of seeing medics and occupational and speech therapists, and spending every day giving Angelo the speech and language therapy she was learning herself as she went along.

Early intervention, she’d read, provided the best hope of a positive outcome in the long run.

While getting the diagnosis was final confirmation of the inescapable, at least it put the Leontiou family on the correct track. They knew which route they had to go down.

Now settled back in Hexham, Natasha and Andreas, who works at Bob the Barber’s in the town centre, work hard to ensure Angelo has a safe, secure and comforting daily routine.

Bed times are a bit of a nightmare though – he’s so highly charged that sleep can be hard to come by generally. And eating out is whole saga in itself.

Andreas said: “When we go out for a meal, we put him in a high chair and give him the iPad. People make comments to us, because we must look like the laziest parents going, but it’s the only way we can sit for even a little while.

“The thing is, just doing that gets him used to being in cafes – he’s learning to go out.”

Natasha worries about the effect people staring at Angelo doing his idiosyncratic arm flapping will have on him as he gets older. Will he become aware of their reactions and the adverse nature of the comments some people feel free to make?

That is why she has spoken out this month. “My birthday is on April 2, which also happens to be World Autism Awareness Day,” she said. “I think now I was born to raise awareness of autism.”

Anyone interested in learning more about the new special needs playgroup can contact her via email: LittleLightsHexham@hotmail.com.