About Hilary
Some background
Hilary suffers from what is called classic autism. From the time he was born, he has had trouble socializing with others, speaking and many other of the basic social interaction skills that the rest of us take for granted.
When Hilary was born, autism affected only 1 in 10,000 births. It the past 34 years since he was born, autism has exploded to almost 1 in 60 births. There are an almost infinite number of variables that make up autism spectrum dissorder. Children can display autistic-like behaviors, but be completely normal socially and mentally. In the most severe cases, autistic persons may do nothing more than sit in a corner rocking all day.
While there are now some wonderful schools that are equiped to teach autistic children, when Hilary was born, there was nothing. Public schools were unable to deal with his unique needs, so he was home schooled by his mom until he was 10 years old, using materials supplied by several Phd experts in the field.
By the time Hilary was 10, a wonderful school had finally opened in our home town, and he was enrolled. We and his teachers found him far advanced over some of the children that he'd been in public school with years before, so his mom's hard work paid off.
Hilary's father is an engineer and musician, and Hilary took to music very young. He always had access to the worlds best music, as well as several instruments. Hilary plays the keyboard with the best of them, and often scores his own classical music.
On a family trip to Alaska one year, Hilary picked up a crayon for the first time and started drawing what he saw out the motorhome window. Thus was born, and age 7 his love for art. While he's always had a computer, 2005 saw us putting together top notch work station with multiple tarabytes of hard drive space and 8 gigs of ram. Along with a midi interface for his keyboard and some great animation rendering software, Hilary has gone crazy for drawing his own cartoons! By the way, Hilary runs Linux!
Hilary is a 2 year old in the 5'10" 300lb body of a 34 year old adult, and Like a 2 year old he can have a difficult time when things don't go just his way. He can have tantrums that last a full day, because he crashed his computer, or because he can't find a particular video on Youtube that he watched just last week.
If you are new to autism, or have a child just put into that catagory, hang in there. While an autistic child can put a great strain on a family, if you look, there can be many rewards. We can't imagine our family without Hilary. He brings us daily joy.
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