Tool Storage

A few months ago, I bought a shabby little wall cupboard at one of my favorite thrift stores.  It was cheaply made and horribly painted, but I liked it and it only cost three dollars.

I don’t remember what I intended to do with it at the time.  Truth be told, I’ve twice tossed it back to the donate pile and subsequently retrieved it.

Today I finally put it to use.  Behold the latest unconventional organizer in our home – a shabby chic screwdriver storage cabinet:

An empty almond body butter container is home to all of the miscellaneous screws we have accumulated in twelve plus years of home ownership.

I drilled a bunch of holes in the top to hold the screwdrivers.  The wood sort of splintered and the paint chipped as I went along, but who cares?  It’s ugly under there, but it’s tool storage, right?

The little drawers hold cup hooks, larger bolts and the wee little screwdrivers we use to replace the teeny batteries in our son’s interactive musical story books.

I know it’s ridiculous to love a storage cabinet, especially one that’s so darned ugly…

but I LOVE my storage cabinet!  Don’t you?!

♥

Happy Friday! 

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Desk Supply Storage

A frustrating search for rubber bands motivated me to corral our office supplies today.

I hung a clear plastic shoe organizer over the coat closet door and filled it up.

Now, we can see exactly what we have.

I got the idea from this post on the blog Laura’s Crafty Life.  Thank you for the inspiration, Laura!

I bought my organizer from The Container Store because their version is the best intersection of reasonable price and quality product.

It has a metal bar across the top and the pockets are really well sewn.  It’s made from clear thick plastic too, not that weird mesh or thinner plastic stuff you find on the ones from Walmart or wherever.

Mine cost $15 and it came with small over-the-door hooks, which I did not use.  Instead, I hung it from three old cup hooks.  My closet door fits so tightly in the frame that it won’t close if something is hanging over the top of it.

I probably won’t need to buy glue sticks, staples or erasers again for a while.  Or ever.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I do intend to someday sort through those erasers and ditch the dirty ones.

You may recall that my son often has very sweet and modest gift requests for his birthday and Christmas.  Pencils frequently top his lists, so I keep buying them.  We have dozens.  There are even a few in there with his name on them.

I started sharpening all those pencils, but quickly realized how hazardous they would be if they were all pointy.  I left them mostly dull.  I put them in with the erasers down to keep from poking holes in the plastic.  They’re in the top row to keep from poking holes in my kid.

I discovered a large stash of mini markers too.  I surely bought them from the Target dollar bins as give-away stocking stuffers or something long ago, but I still have them, and now they’re ORGANIZED!  Woohoo!  Let me know if you want to come over and make any mini marks.

In all this sorting and shifting and tossing and stowing, I never found my rubber bands.  I had to buy a new bag this afternoon.  Oh well.  At least I know where the new bag is.

And the funniest (most ironic??) thing about using a shoe organizer to store my office supplies?  Look at the shoes.

Ha!  Happy Wednesday!

♥

Have you organized anything lately?

♥♥

Spring Break Phone Pix Dump

We actually did a lot over the two-week break.

The child had a bad case of the hives, got really sick, and also lost another tooth, but he rallied for the best parts of his vacation.
He had no trouble inhaling a basketful of candy on Easter morning.

The rest of our days went something like this…

lunch with Grandma
Inflatable World
Pump It Up
several different parks
a night at the downtown Marriott
egg hunts
and
I guess I’m too tired to remember anything else.
Enjoy the photos!

Oh, I almost forgot!
Husband got a new job.
(Insert great relief here.)
He started yesterday.
So far, so good!

Insert bad family photo here (complete with chinless child and bug-eyed mommy):

I love this next one of my husband.  He’s more than a little freaked out by heights, but that didn’t stop him from enjoying our 11th floor view of the bay and the bridge.

The pools were beautiful.  The smaller one was walk-in warm in the morning.

Next on the agenda?
Back to school this morning and then to the kid’s salon for a long overdue haircut!

What did you do?

♥♥

Stuff That Helps My Autistic Kid – #1 in a series

Turning on the subtitles when he watches his favorite movies.

My son didn’t start talking until he was four years old.  Even now, at ten years, he is far behind his peers and still has enormous trouble communicating when he is upset, confused, or hurting.

Anything that helps him understand his emotions, motivate his speech, or improve his reading comprehension is important for him.  And for our family.

This morning, he came up to me and spontaneously rattled off a list of words – “sighing,” “echoing,” “stammering,” “gasping,” and “straining” – and he gave me appropriate examples of each one.

His new vocabulary came straight from the subtitles of the movie Enchanted.  Each word appears in parentheses there to describe the dialogue and emotion in the current scene.

He has read those words and listened to the associated speech a hundred times.  Now, he knows it all well enough to come up with examples of his own.

When my son first insisted on reading the subtitles a few years ago, I found it very distracting.  We displayed them by accident once or twice, and it seemed the faster we reached to click them off, the more he wanted them on.  Smart boy.  Now, he turns them on for everything.

The subtitles help his awareness of ambient (and usually meaningful) background noises as well.  In Enchanted, he knows when to listen for “truck horn honking” and “glass breaking” and he has made the connection between these words, their sounds, and the storyline.

Subtitles also make it easier to catch elusive song lyrics.  Enchanted includes some amazing and very clever musical scenes.  Despite the beautiful, clear voice of Disney princess Giselle (played by Amy Adams), some of the lyrics were a mystery to us until we read them at the foot of the screen.  Now, we laugh every time we hear and see them.

These days, I can’t imagine watching a video with my son and not having the words on.

Those subtitles help my kid.  And that helps me. 

♥

What simple things help you and your kids?

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P.S. Easter Egg ears are all the rage in our house today. 

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Jelly Bean Eggs

We made our construction paper Easter eggs this week.

I think we did more this time than ever before.

The first year, we mostly just decorated the eggs.

Now, our tradition is to write on them.

The boy does most of it.

Here are a few of my favorites:

He also made a couple of really LARGE eggs:

I wrote on a few of them too:

We also played with balloons this week.

And we made a bed on the stairs.

What did you do?

♥♥

Sick Day Activities

My son is home from school again.  It’s the third day in a row.

He has been sick all week with a bad cold (not to be confused with the vomiting nightmare that kept him home three days last week). 

To pass his lethargic downtime, he has been playing with Singing Fingers on the iPad a lot.

It’s loud.  He is loud.

Do you remember the theremin scene from Big Bang Theory?

It feels a bit like that.  It kind of makes my head hurt.

Yesterday, I felt I might go insane from it.  (Or, just maybe, I would discover that I had gone insane from it the day before.)

Today is a little less stressful.

Thanks to a visiting friend and an unemployed husband, I got to leave the house without my son for a while.

The break did me a world of good, and reminded me how much fun I have with my kid.

When I came back, he asked me to film this:

I sure do love this boy.

♥

What did you do today?

♥♥

Sick Again

The boy is home from school again today.

He missed three days last week because of a stomach bug and now he has a very annoying cold.

My kid can’t seem to catch a break.

And neither can we.

He’s a bear when his nose is bothering him.  He wiggles and whines and screams and goes insane.  Same deal.  Different day.  Frequent topic.

It makes us all nuts.

And there’s no real way to explain to anyone what we go through in our house.

He’s an angel out in the world.  He behaves, he is loving, he handles things.  (Except occasionally at school, but that’s another post.)

At home though, when it’s just the two of us, or just the three of us, he is a different kid.

He is inconsolable, desperate, angry, sad, very physical, exhausting and exhausted.

He wakes in the middle of the night, will do nothing to help himself, but is insistent that we are awake and miserable with him.

We rarely get a full night of uninterrupted sleep.

Our son slams doors, throws toys, twists his body, flails his arms, furrows his brow, screeches, and screams, but he says nothing.

We try desperately to help him, but our efforts generally fail.

Last night, husband actually got him to take some Motrin.  He was tired and it did help him to fall asleep, but he was up again at 3:45 and back to his routine of misery.

I asked him repeatedly what I could do for him.

I suggested all of the usual remedies for his bothersome throat and nose and I tried to comfort him.

I offered him a snack, some water, and a hug.

Nothing worked.

At 4:30, I gave up and told him I was going back to bed.

I closed the door to our room, but that made him crazy.

He got louder and louder and finally crashed something into the door.

Husband got up that time.

This morning has shown more of the same.

The boy is miserable from the cold and he wants everyone to know it and feel it right along with him.  It’s maddening.

He took some more Motrin about an hour ago.  He has eaten a hot dog and even exercised at my urging, but it’s going to be a long day in what already feels like an insanely long week.

Husband is gone for a few hours to catch up with a friend and I will get out for a while when he comes back, but I don’t know how far that will go toward preserving our sanity today.

It’s 12:15 p.m. and I’ve yet to make it out of my pajamas and into the shower.  My hair is dirty and flat.  My skin is colorless.  Honestly, I look like the sick one.

Stress.

We need a babysitter.

I’m starting to forget what my laughter sounds like.

♥

P.S.  The best thing to happen today?  I got out the camera to make a video of his on-going tantrum and suddenly he’s a model – posing, smiling, saying “cheese” for all these photos.

He’s on the couch, watching a video now.  Maybe I will get a shower after all.

♥♥