Picture this. You set sail to go to a wonderful exotic location. All your friends talk about this place. How warm the weather is. How wonderful the people are. You end up on a foreign island. The wrong one. This wasn't the one my friend's all talked about. You desperately try to find your way back to where you wanted to go. Only to realize your stuck. Forever. Alone. You didn't get a chance to research the place you were going. Who lives here? What is the weather like? What language do they speak? This is how I look at my life with Reilly. All my friends ( for the most part) have "typical" developing children. You read the books, did the research. After all, all your friends and even strangers have raised "typical" developing children. So you can base on what to do from their experience. We were thrown into this blind. For a long time we just "winged" it. We didn't have any friends with what we were going through.I didn't want to be where we were sent.

This is the place where we were sent. At first the people are welcoming. They are wonderful. All of a sudden one day they retaliate against you. They don't like you. In fact, they don't even remember your name anymore. Even though you've known them for years. Just when you think the local people hate you, they begin to like you again. Your not sure if you can get used to that behaviour. You start to realize everything you do sets these people off. The sounds, what you feed them etc. No one taught you what the language was or the history of the people. Or even what weather to expect. You are starting to hate living here but you can't find a way out. You have to get used to it. Just when you think you cannot stand it anymore, you see a beautiful flower emerge. From now on you keep searching for those flowers all over the island. Some days you find none, and some days you find a whole patch.

Most people only see this island from afar, through a telescope. Which has a narrow point of view. The people that see where you live have an opinion on what they think the island looks like but they have no idea the things you have been through living in this unknown, unpredicatable island on your own.