Thursday

A lot of my posts are entitled "Thursday", I have noticed. I just give them a day of the week title when I don't have anything specific I intend to write about. I'm usually home on Thursdays, so that must be why I end up writing then!

Well, I am painting again today - you all know how much I love doing that! This time it is the stairway and upstairs hallway. The last time I did this Paul was able to borrow one of those special ladders that you can use on steps from his boss. He isn't working for him any longer so now we're going to have rig up something using our own regular ladders and some planks. I will surely be grateful if I don't end up with a broken neck out of this. I have to get way, way up high. It would be nice if I were a little taller! I am using the same colors I did in the living room - cream and barn red. Then, I will never paint again, for as long as I live.

We're still trying to decide what to do with the house. Paul has come up with a brainstorm that involves completely redoing the downstairs bathroom and building a laundry room that would be accessible from the new bathroom. But, first we need to get our realtor out here to look at the place and to give us an estimate on what he thinks we could sell this place, as is, for. And, I told Paul that before he starts any more projects, first he has to finish up all the existing projects! I want only confined unfinished work and messes from now on! And before we have the realtor come out I need to sit down with our bill list and figure out exactly what it is we would need to make on the house in order to be able to afford a larger, Warren county one. We're interested in the possibility of a foreclosure, which might give us more house for less money. My good friend Kathy and her husband just bought one of those for a really, really reasonable price. They had 5 children in a cramped ranch house they had purchased as newlyweds. Now they have 5 bedrooms! So - lots of unknowns at this point! I'm still pretty neutral, I guess.

Ben's psychiatrist appt. is two weeks from yesterday. It can't come soon enough! On one hand, a lot of my fibers are still protesting the fact that I am actually taking my own child to shrink. It makes it sound like he's riddled with mental problems. On the other hand...not two seconds ago Will informed me that Ben licked the furniture again. This has been an on again, off again, problem for years now. It's totally sensory, but Ben gets some thrill out of licking things that are not food. It's embarrassing, it's disgusting, it's unsanitary! He swiped his tongue across the van window the other night. I made him clean the window when we got home. I don't know what else to do beyond that. Yesterday he decided to pour his pop down the sink. Instead, he poured it all over the counter beside the sink. I watched him toss a drink container in the drawer as he unloaded the dishwasher. It landed on the floor beside the drawer and he would have left it there if I hadn't pointed it out to him. At therapy yesterday, his therapist mentioned to me that she is really working with him on hand washing, that his mind is so far away that he isn't even paying attention when he does that. Argh! So is he a daydreamer, lazy, or is this just one more manifestation of the autistic mind? At the rate he is going he'll never be able to hold down a job for someone else. And I'm not sure how to approach this - should I discipline for his inattention, should I just continually correct, or is it even something he cannot help? Don't know - hoping to get some answers in a couple weeks!

I'm mulling over some thoughts on Psalm 92 (I think that's the chapter) and a conversation I had with my sister in law, Kirsti, a couple of weeks ago. If I get them to come together in my head, I may have a post in a few days.