Lou the Destroyer!

I have a wonderful little autistic child that we are going to start referring to as "The Destroyer". Lou has become very bored with her life lately, and as a consequence she has started exploring the house in search of something else to entertain her. In the space of one hour last Friday she was put into time out 5 times. The child destroys everything she touches. I was attempting to do laundry because it needed doing so badly. The laundry room is upstairs as are all of the bedrooms where all of the clean laundry is kept. So that is where I was hanging out. Lou on the other hand was downstairs spending time with her favorite member of our family... the TV, at least that was what she was suppose to be doing. I turned it on for her, and went upstairs to do said laundry. I came down about 20 minutes later and she was in the family room making a noise that was very familiar. (First let me explain that Lou cannot have books with regular pages because she rips them to shreds.) She had a book, more importantly she had one of my books. I removed the book and then took a minute to look around and noticed that she also had something in her hand that was making a slight crinkling sound. This is when I noticed something on the end table that didn't belong. I had been to the grocery store that day and had bought a package of cupcake papers. Lou had discovered these sitting on the kitchen counter and had promptly ripped into them and assumed that they were a great new toy for her. Here is what she did with them.

I of course did the only thing a good parent could do... I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures. I don't thing these do the situation justice however because they just don't show the scope of what was done. Many of these innocent little papers had been gnawed on first before being strategically placed where they were. Some had been mangled beyond recognition. There were 50 of them spread all over the room, I know this number because that was how many were in the package, and there wasn't a single one left in the package. I let her keep the ones that she had bit and mangled beyond usefulness, and she had a great time with them for the rest of the day. There were pieces spread all over the house, but hey, that is what the vacuum is for... right.