My two-year-old needs a LOT of sleep. So much sleep that I try to avoid telling people how much of it she needs so as to not get evil glares. The thing is, she doesn’t fall asleep well. All of the events of the day take it’s toll on her at night, and it’s difficult for her to relax. She falls in and out of restless sleep and then eventually around 1am falls into a REM.
Because of this, it is absolutely impossible to wake her up before 9am. I mean, you CAN wake her up, but what ensues is a day that will leave you balled up in a corner somewhere crying and pleading for it to end. So basically, I try to avoid at all costs anything that requires waking her up before then. And here’s where the trouble starts….. …continue reading
How many times were we told as children: “Clean your plate”, “Don’t talk with your mouth full”, “Don’t play with your food”? I’m not saying that our mothers, and those generations of mothers before us, were wrong. But sometimes rules are made to be broken. And when you are a mother of a child who has sensory processing disorder, often those rules are thrown out the window altogether. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn’t mean that the children are running wild with no discipline at all. It simply means that the “rules” aren’t as important as the development of the child.
Here are some ways that we are breaking all of the rules, and loving it:
1. Don’t play with your food: A huge part of JC’s therapy for tactile aversion is messy play and we often use food for this. If he can’t stand to touch applesauce, he will never eat it! So desensitizing him to the feel of those textures is an important way to pave the path for him to eventually explore them with his mouth. Creating a fun activity with those items that he avoids reduces the anxiety that he feels and will hopefully allow him to associate food with fun rather than pain, angst and fear.
2. Clean your plate: When a child has anxiety related to food, adding to that anxiety by forcing them to eat is going to be counter-productive. I have even found that limiting the amount of food that I put on JC’s plate helps this anxiety level a great deal. If he has more than a few bites on his plate at once, it seems too overwhelming and he will push the plate away and refuse to eat altogether. Likewise, if there is more than one type of food on his plate, its harder to get him to eat anything at all. So I try using separate bowls so that he can focus on one item at a time. It also helps that he knows he can push one bowl away and still have the other to eat from. I also only put a small amount out at first. If he starts to eat it, he will usually ASK for more which gives him a more proactive role in the meal-time process. …continue reading
