Hi, I'm Sue. Here's Why I Finally Got Organized.

So. I'm Sue. I live in Minneapolis with my husband Mark, our seven-year-old Eli, and our four-year-old Maya. We have a house here, a small rental property over in Saint Paul, and a condo in Naples that we escape to in February when Minnesota is fully unlivable.

Eli is autistic. That matters to what I write about here, so I'm saying it right up front.

The moment I knew I had a problem, an organization problem, not an Eli problem... was the day I missed a door-alarm battery change because I'd written the date in my Notes app, but I'd also written something vague in Google Calendar, and there was a sticky note on the fridge that said "CHECK ALARM??" with the question marks doing a lot of heavy lifting. The alarm still worked, technically. But I'd been holding that date in my head for two weeks, which meant I was also holding it instead of other things.

That was the furnace filter size situation too. And the tenant lease renewal date. And Eli's OT schedule, which changes every few months and involves three different people and a pediatric dentist who specializes in working with autistic kids, which alone took us eight months to find and I refuse to lose that contact in a text thread.

I was keeping my entire life in seven different places and calling it a system.

Here's the thing about managing a home when your kid is autistic. Routines aren't just nice to have, they're structural. The visual schedule by the door, the specific order of the morning, the sensory room we built out in the basement with its weighted blankets and specific lighting - that room has maintenance needs just like the furnace does. Bulbs that can't flicker. A white noise machine that needs a backup. Door alarms that absolutely cannot be an afterthought, because wandering risk is real and we take it seriously.

When I found epBode, the thing that made me actually stay was small. There's a per-property toggle for special needs households, and the setup questionnaire asked about door alarms and safety locks as their own line items. Not buried. Not an afterthought. First-class questions. I sat there thinking, oh, whoever built this has met someone like us.

That's what I'll be writing about here. The small stuff that isn't actually small. The battery dates and the lease renewals and the OT provider contacts and the sensory room checklists. Mark thinks I've become slightly obsessed. He's not wrong. But our house finally makes sense on paper, and I have thoughts.