Out of sorts

What does one do when one child likes to repeat sounds to calm down, and the other needs absolute silence?

My mom is thinking about buying them both headphones. Joey's will be connected to a CD player, so he can play his favorite songs and chatter and sing to his heart's content.

Andy will get noise-canceling phones so he doesn't have to hear any of it.

Yes, the boys are out of sorts. Friday afternoon, I tried to get the boys outside- something that is usually a very popular idea- and we had a drip of rain. They both ran into the house at the first drop. That is really odd. They retreated to the basement. Any time either of them appeared upstairs, I had him bounce on the trampoline for a minute. Trying to get them calm. It worked a little.

Allan kept them moving a good bit today, in the basement, outside. We went to see Dexter, and that was a good time had by all. BUt I think the wild schedule takes its toll. Tomorrow we'll go see the cousins, and so that will be another tiring, unscheduled day. Then he will go to school, but not usual school, because its only a half-day, with no breakfast or lunch there. Joey finds that really odd. Everything is chaos.

Three months of chaos. The result? Out of sorts. It's only natural. At least we have enough structure to pull him through. The summers before, those preschool summers we failed to get ESY for him, he would be a wild ball of stimming by now. I know some folks don't see anything wrong with stimming, but for Joey, it does become problematic if he only stims.

Right now, it is a matter of management. Joey needs to chatter. It is a sort of stim, but not a distracting, drift-away kind, so I don't really want to stifle it (it would kind of be like taking a kid's teddy bear away- perfectly harmless for a kid to hug a teddy bear to calm himself, right?) Andy needs quiet. having them both stressed out in the same car can be... interesting.

How much are those phones, again?