Michael has actually gained a bit of an imagination, his speech therapist commented on it, and said that is a big stride for him developmentally.

Notwithstanding the fact that I have extreme difficulty in expressing myself clearly, I think I'll try to clarify my previous post further.  For my son (an individual with autism), plastic bits (regardless of their color or shape) were items he would just line up or stack and generally spread around the house.  Although we never bought him a play food set, this included all sorts of plastic "boy" things like tools and bolts and screws, etc.  He showed very little interest in "pretend" or representative play.

To teach him language, his therapists did use plastic "pretend" objects, but he was generally more engaged if they could use the real thing.  He generally had difficulty extending the "name" of one thing to other "like" things, so if a plastic piece of corn became known to him as "corn," he had difficulty envisioning the use of the same word for a real cob of corn.

Although my mom worked with me and my sibs in the kitchen from a very early age, my son was probably older than 4 1/2 when this started happening for us.  This is because prior to the development of some language skills, he was completely disinterested in what I was doing and was truly in his own little world.  To escape being watched, he would generally go where I was not to get into things.  

Anyway, I can relate to some of the property damage you have been describing with Wyatt.  He is obviously very active.  At that stage with my son, our only recourse was to get rid of a lot of our stuff (as Cindy put it in one post - simplify our environment),  We also had a good quality set of childproof locks, but had to be doubly diligent in watching him anyway.  It was, I admit, exhausting and I can certainly feel for what you seem to be going through right now.

I think, though, it is a positive sign of progress for Wyatt - he seems to be developing some communication skills and at the very least has some interest in the fact that you share his space in the world.   Have faith, in time things should get easier.

After my son did start to get interested in what I was doing, I obviously had to be careful what we introduced to him and when.  For example, when I was chopping and if he came into the kitchen, I could not wait until he made a grab for the chopping knife since he was by then too strong to wrestle for it.  I would have to be one step ahead of him and offer him a dull table knife and something soft to "chop" with it.  I preferred this approach of giving him something OK and instructing him in the proper use of it instead of just constantly trying to take things away from him (which was the habit we had gotten into when he was non-communicative).

I hope this clears things up a bit and I think I'm just gonna give up and stop commenting.  It never seems clear when I'm talking about a particular stage in my son's development and seems to come across as being judgmental, which is not intended.  Good luck to you all.