Sonic and SuperBoy!

Gotta love autistic kids and their quirks and obsessions, right?   In Aaron's case, characters like Thomas the Tank Engine and Buzz Lightyear, and a fairly precocious aptitude for computers, puzzles, reading and math, made up somewhat for deficits in communicative language, social skills, motor planning, and pragmatic skills.  The fact that Thomas and Buzz entranced him made them excellent teaching and modeling tools when conventional modeling and teaching failed.  But in December of 2004, our family experienced a seismic shift of epic proportions:

Aaron received a GameCube video game platform.

And our lives were never the same.  The the music, dialogue, and characters of Sonic the Hedgehog, and later, Super Mario Brothers, became (and still are) the official soundtrack of our household.  Although Aaron has since added Pokemon, MegaMan, The Legend of Zelda and the Wii and the Nintendo DS to his video-game lexicon, I have a feeling that Sonic and Mario will forever be his first loves.  Annoying and ubiquitous as they can be, a child's obsessions can become invaluable springboards for learning, creativity, social skills, and even discipline, so long as some kind of balance can be maintained.  And therein lies the rub -- finding balance with an uber-obsessed autistic child is a daily challenge.  Man cannot live on Sonic the Hedgehog alone, but Aaron would certainly like to try!

Behold, Aaron's first original computer animation, conceived, written and executed by the boy himself (with Dad's help) in 2008: