Michael needs more fiber and more liquid..... now if

somebody can just tell me how to get my husband to

stop scratching himself lol =)~~~

I am always cleaning up poomergencies. (I made that word up so don't bother going to dictionary.com) Lately, the dog has had the runs and the cat has gotten locked out of the bathroom a couple of times recently. She always goes down the hall and makes her mess in Wyatt's room which is where his home therapy goes on. So in the morning I have had to follow my nose and locate the mess and I can tell the therapist just wants to gag that they are forced to work in a smelly, filthy room, but they are very polite. Sometimes Wyatt has really soft smooshy stools and they slop out of the diaper, but other times it is as picture perfect as you described :) If anyone ever shined one of those black-light UV crime scene lights around my house, I am sure they would get an eye full.

As for PECS, I resisted using them for the longest time, partly because we were involved in a research study that used the PRT method and partly because Wyatt loved to rip out all of the PECS from his book and throw them in the air. I didn't feel like I was ready to deal with that behavior on top of everything else, so I put PECS on the back burner. But just very recently I've been leaving his book out so he has access and he is now bringing me various food PECS some of the time.

Yes, it is relatively quiet here. We have a lot of white noise. If you listen, you can hear the freeway, trains, and airplanes. During the day the gardening noises can be horrible (leafblowing, lawnmowing). The garages make a lot of noise, but in our block of four units there isn't much activity. At the very end unit some rich couple uses their unit as a part-time office and they store an enormous golf cart in their garage (below my kitchen)--they are hardly ever here. I see the lady every once in a while escorting a maid--yes, a maid!--into the unit. Next door to them is a single schoolteacher who leaves before dawn every morning and is incredibly quiet. Right next door to me is a single retired lady who is also very nice and quiet. The closest unit on the other side of us is a retired cop and his German wife. He is very industrious and sometimes works on noisy projects in his spotless garage, but I don't mind that happy-busy noise. There is a lady in the building behind us who is a piano teacher, and that is a nice noise. But she is on meds and goes off the deep end every so often and we can hear her screaming. I just tune it out and hope that people do the same for me when I get a little angry and vent a bit.

But when it comes to Marc, he is a total quiet fanatic. If someone so much as turns up their stereo a tiny bit, he contemplates calling the police for "disturbing the peace" complaints. He is very concerned that if even one Party Central type moves into the neighborhood then others will follow and soon there will be a meth lab and a crackhouse down the street.

I actually have lived down the street from a crackhouse before. When I was 19 my folks moved from the country to an old neighborhood in a larger city and there was a crackhouse down the alley from us. We would find used needles and bags of dope thrown into our planters. But then, at a friend's birthday party, my dad just happened to meet some DEA official guy (the police never did anything about it) and then within a week the crackhouse was gone. So that is my crackhouse story.