Preventing Domestic Disasters: When People Move Your Stuff

You know what drives me crazy?  When someone (like my husband) moves things and doesn’t tell me about it.  I know it’s not on purpose, and that most people have no idea how important it is for me to arrange things in a certain way and to know that every last thing will be exactly where I expect to find it.

When I found the plates and a set of bowls in the wrong spots, I decided that putting up a template would be easier than explaining the mistake, since after all a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

I’ve made photo templates like this as I’ve practiced setting up event tables, and it’s been a huge help because I’m such a visual person.  It’s simple to just take the picture on my phone and either print it out or store it on the phone for later.

As I looked through our cabinets to photograph them, I was shocked to find two whole bags of brown sugar that I didn’t know we had because they had been moved to the wrong cabinet and I’d only been looking in my designated “bags of excess baking powders” spot.  (Whereas they’d been moved to a dark corner of the “pretty canisters of flour and sugar” cabinet.)  So over the past few months, I’ve been buying brown sugar, wondering how on earth we keep going through so much of it!

It’s absolutely true that an autistic will keep looking in the same spot even when common sense says it probably isn’t there.  (Hello Sally, Hello Ann.)  For those of you who are wondering, yes, my parents did try to work on this when I was younger…I’m just extremely visual and rely on routines.  Fortunately I know that it’s much easier to use those visual strengths to help myself rather than fight who I am!

(Look, even Molly gets one…)