Sensory overload

Tuesday at playgroup we had a sensory activity. These are messy fun things we do maybe once a month, aimed at the older babies in the group. The goal of a sensory activity is to encourage the little ones to make some mess. Apparently, if a kiddo doesn't get enough chance to make a mess when they're this little, they grow up with a sort of OCDish compulsion to always be clean, and will get really freaked out by sticky fingers or a runny nose in later life. Who knew??

Anyway, this week's activity (and I use the word activity quite loosely) was to give each of the babies a mound of whipped cream to play with. The younger kids sat at one table and Liam, Autum and Ryan, who is just a week younger than Liam, sat at the other. The coordinator gave Liam and Autum each a pile of whipped cream (the kind you squirt from a can) before we sat down. Autum took the first crack at it - Jeannine stuck her fingers in the pile right away, and Autum started screaming at the top of her lungs. Tears, the whole works. As Jeannine tried to calm Autum down, Ryan joined us, and the coordinator squirted out his whipped cream. The sound of the nozzle on the can scared the bejeesus out of him, and he started crying, too. Liam hadn't dabbled more than a single finger in his whipped cream yet (see above) and was just watching the other two - but when both of them turned into sobbing wrecks, he joined in for a good sympathy cry, and soon we had a table full of three screaming babies. Autum and Ryan left the table completely - I was able to calm Liam down again, but by then his whipped cream had melted into nothing more than a sticky pool of milk. Not so much fun to play with.

At least we had a fun learning experience in the morning - we were trapped indoors with bad weather, so I introduced Liam to the Tupperware drawer a little earlier than planned. He is very much into a sorting phase right now - he likes to pick something up from his left side and put it down on the right, build a new pile there, and then move it back. So he was quite happy to empty the drawer, piece by piece, and then look to me to refill it before starting all over again.