Sensory Engagement
The kind of intense behavior Baby E had last night was nothing particularly new; maybe just a little more intense and long-lasting than usual.
She often has dizzying transitions from one extreme to another like that; laughing, throwing herself around and seeking motion and stimulation one minute, screaming and pushing away anything that touches her the next.
What was a little more unusual was the fact that she kept falling asleep and then waking up again, crying. Usually once we get her calm enough to fall asleep she'll stay asleep at least a little longer than that. But not always. Last night's behavior was certainly nothing unheard-of around here.
Just another day in the life of the Kangaroo Castle.
But I'm not sure how to categorize it in my 5 rankings. I think generally I consider it green behavior if the majority is happy behavior and the tantrums short-lived, like tonight. But I might have to add another color for the more extreme hyperactive type of behavior as opposed to just normal happy behavior.
That's not something I'll be able to tell from looking back at old notes, though; I would probably have just categorized a night like tonight as a good night but with trouble sleeping. Honestly, anything red or below has been relatively normal to us for quite some time, I think.
Baby E's hatred of clothing is nothing new, either.
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She hates all kinds of clothes, but especially those polyester footed pajamas with non-slip feet. I think the seams in the toes drive her crazy.
She dislikes wearing socks and most especially shoes, which is why she's usually barefoot at home. Anything with long sleeves or that's constricting in the neck bothers her. She often pulls at the skirts of dresses because they get in her way.
She absolutely hates wearing a bib and won't keep one on. She does like hats, as long as she can take them on and off at will.
She has always hated being strapped into anything--shopping carts, car seats, high chairs, strollers, a typical Bjorn-style baby carrier.
At least one of her spells of stage purple behavior could have potentially been triggered by too-tight shoes, and the intense screaming was finally calmed by my removing her socks and shoes and rubbing her feet. I would have just blamed the tight footwear, except that she then went into a basically limp and unresponsive stage before moving into a lethargy and fussiness that lasted for the rest of the day.
She loves being carried in the simple piece of cloth baby wrap--I think partly because it provides gentle, even pressure spread over a wide area of her body but leaves her limbs relatively free to move.
She loves to be touched, and has a very high need to touch, feel, pat and rub things. She's picky about the texture, though--it must be smooth. Furry or velvety things have no appeal for her. She likes satin, but most of all she likes my skin. She almost constantly rubs my face, arms, elbows and hand or wants me to rub her face, hands, belly and feet.
In fact, at the moment she's making typing difficult because she's grabbing my hand and trying to pull it toward her while nursing. When she's in anything other than a stage 1 she makes diaper changes extremely difficult by grabbing at both hands and arms with her feet and arms, cuddling my limbs like a teddy bear. It drives me crazy. I am not a high-touch person.
She likes movement and activity when she's not in a red or purple stage. If she's not in the wrap she needs to be constantly shifted, jiggled, patted and moved around when being held, unless she's in an especially lethargic mood. That's part of the reason I like the SPOC wrap so much--it allows me to relax a bit when carrying her.
Baby E has always liked what seemed to me an unusually high level of bouncing and roughhouse-type play for her age, even compared to my other two rough-and-tumble tomboys. She loves to be held upside-down or tossed in the air. She started enjoying fast movement to varying degrees very young. Sometimes swinging her (carefully, of course!) through the air in varying directions would be the only thing that would soothe her when she cried as an infant. Just swinging her back and forth wasn't enough; it had to be multi-directional.
We tried her in an infant swing a number of times when she was younger. She loved it for about the first 3 swings each time, then got bored and wanted out. It only moved back and forth, and that wasn't stimulating enough. The only way she liked it was if one of us was there providing more stimulation--something like saying "boo" and grabbing her feet whenever she swung our direction.
Now she likes the full-body tackle and roll football/wrestling type of play.
Textures like water, grass and sand take many exposures and gradual introduction for her to start enjoying them. She used to get frightened and upset, pulling her feet and hands away and crying, when we tried to set her down in an area with grass or sand, or tried to get her to touch water. Sand terrified her for a long time.
Once she got used to the textures, though, she loved them. Now she will sit literally for hours running her hands through sand or grass, feeling it and playing with it. A bath is one of the few things that will usually calm her at least briefly even in a level 4 period.
By far her favorite thing to feel is my skin. Sometimes when she is crying I will take her hand and/or feet and rub it on my arm or cheek, and she'll calm down.
When Baby E is not feeling well, she can't sleep unless I'm touching her cheek or she has both hands on my elbows or face. Many nights I've fallen asleep next to her crib with one hand reaching through the slats to pillow her head. She'll hold my hand in both of hers, laying her cheek on it and rubbing her face and lips against it. She'll fall half asleep on my hand, but wake screaming if I try to pull it away. Often this can go on for hours--another reason she often ends up in our bed.
Things like a runny nose or something sticky or dirty on her hands bother her a lot, but paradoxically she is rarely much disturbed by a true injury. She's constantly getting bumps and bruises, and is not much fazed by them. She may cry and say "ow" for a couple of minutes, but then she'll be over it just like that, with nothing but a lump or a bruise to show for it.
Textures are very important to her, even in her food. She doesn't like anything mealy or starchy, like potatoes or squash. She doesn't like anything lumpy or grainy. She'll eat carrots raw but not cooked. She doesn't like most vegetables, cooked or raw; I'm not sure why. It's certainly not that she hasn't been offered a variety of foods.
When she was still eating apples, she'd eat apples sliced or pureed, but couldn't stand the coarser texture of regular applesauce unless it was mixed with yogurt to make it more smooth.
She likes ground beef, but only if the pieces are big enough. She doesn't like anything crumbly, and if the pieces of meat are too small she doesn't want to eat them. She doesn't like any grain smaller than rice for the same reason, unless it's ground into flour and baked into a bread-like item. Even if I feed grainy things to her on a spoon she just doesn't like the texture.
But it's not that she doesn't like picking up small things. She's always picking particles almost too tiny to see out of the carpet and handing them to me, insistent that they don't belong on the floor.
Sometimes she will entertain herself this way without much involvement from me for long minutes at a time, if I'm not keeping a close enough eye on her. She has a favorite activity for this: sitting and picking pine needles and bits of tree debris out of the rug just inside the back door. She'll pull them one by one out of the rug, put them in her mouth, and then start gagging and spitting and wanting me to help her get them off her tongue.
She'll do this over and over, mostly just with pine needles. I don't know why. The vacuum won't get all the needles out of the rug and they're constantly being tracked in, so they're always there even if I vacuum frequently.
She also likes to pull tissues out of the box and eat them if she can get hold of a box.
Some days (some green or yellow days) she'll entertain herself well for an hour or more at a time, happily playing with toys and exploring on her own, or taking things in and out of containers.
But most of the time she requires something very engaging in order to entertain herself when she feels well. I have to come up with some interesting set of objects to manipulate or puzzle for her to accomplish, and this will keep her occupied for a period of time.
Sometimes I wonder if, at least sometimes, the difference between green, yellow and orange is less in how she feels and more in the amount of attention I'm able to focus on her in a given day.
The child is extremely bright, so it's hard to find things that are engaging and challenging enough for her without being too difficult or dangerous.
She loves wooden puzzles and will try to put the pieces in their places, but doesn't quite have the skill and dexterity to turn the pieces to the right angle to actually get them into the holes. So she gets frustrated and ends up losing interest.
But then she'll play with something like a toy hairbrush for an extended period of time, brushing her own hair repeatedly and trying to brush the hair of anything else within reach.
She likes telephones, but she can tell the difference between a real phone and a toy phone, even if the real phone has the keypad locked and the toy phone is equipped with lights and noises.
She'll take the real phone, thank you very much. Woe betide anyone who tries to take it away.
She likes climbing things and sliding down things, but that's a little dangerous for her to do on her own at this age while I'm helping the other kids with schoolwork.
Basically, she requires constant attention and supervision, like most 15-month-olds. Much of this seems to me to be quite within the range of normal, if perhaps on the more sensitive and high-maintenance end of the scale.
I kind of doubt she has a "sensory integration disorder," although since it's been suggested several times I'll ask the doctor about it. I expect that whatever else is going on with her could possibly cause some sensory overload when combined with her normal higher sensitivity.
My guess is that when she's not in pain she's just a very intelligent, intense, high-energy child who is on the high end of the spectrum when it comes to sensory input and need for stimulation.
Just like her mom and two older sisters, or perhaps a bit more so.
When I read about SID, I think it all sounds pretty normal, actually. The descriptions on the pages about sensory processing disorder seem to me like they could fit just about anyone. Just about anyone in my family, anyway.
I don't think that necessarily means we all have SID.
She often has dizzying transitions from one extreme to another like that; laughing, throwing herself around and seeking motion and stimulation one minute, screaming and pushing away anything that touches her the next.
What was a little more unusual was the fact that she kept falling asleep and then waking up again, crying. Usually once we get her calm enough to fall asleep she'll stay asleep at least a little longer than that. But not always. Last night's behavior was certainly nothing unheard-of around here.
Just another day in the life of the Kangaroo Castle.
But I'm not sure how to categorize it in my 5 rankings. I think generally I consider it green behavior if the majority is happy behavior and the tantrums short-lived, like tonight. But I might have to add another color for the more extreme hyperactive type of behavior as opposed to just normal happy behavior.
That's not something I'll be able to tell from looking back at old notes, though; I would probably have just categorized a night like tonight as a good night but with trouble sleeping. Honestly, anything red or below has been relatively normal to us for quite some time, I think.
Baby E's hatred of clothing is nothing new, either.
##############
She hates all kinds of clothes, but especially those polyester footed pajamas with non-slip feet. I think the seams in the toes drive her crazy.
She dislikes wearing socks and most especially shoes, which is why she's usually barefoot at home. Anything with long sleeves or that's constricting in the neck bothers her. She often pulls at the skirts of dresses because they get in her way.
She absolutely hates wearing a bib and won't keep one on. She does like hats, as long as she can take them on and off at will.
She has always hated being strapped into anything--shopping carts, car seats, high chairs, strollers, a typical Bjorn-style baby carrier.
At least one of her spells of stage purple behavior could have potentially been triggered by too-tight shoes, and the intense screaming was finally calmed by my removing her socks and shoes and rubbing her feet. I would have just blamed the tight footwear, except that she then went into a basically limp and unresponsive stage before moving into a lethargy and fussiness that lasted for the rest of the day.
She loves being carried in the simple piece of cloth baby wrap--I think partly because it provides gentle, even pressure spread over a wide area of her body but leaves her limbs relatively free to move.
She loves to be touched, and has a very high need to touch, feel, pat and rub things. She's picky about the texture, though--it must be smooth. Furry or velvety things have no appeal for her. She likes satin, but most of all she likes my skin. She almost constantly rubs my face, arms, elbows and hand or wants me to rub her face, hands, belly and feet.
In fact, at the moment she's making typing difficult because she's grabbing my hand and trying to pull it toward her while nursing. When she's in anything other than a stage 1 she makes diaper changes extremely difficult by grabbing at both hands and arms with her feet and arms, cuddling my limbs like a teddy bear. It drives me crazy. I am not a high-touch person.
She likes movement and activity when she's not in a red or purple stage. If she's not in the wrap she needs to be constantly shifted, jiggled, patted and moved around when being held, unless she's in an especially lethargic mood. That's part of the reason I like the SPOC wrap so much--it allows me to relax a bit when carrying her.
Baby E has always liked what seemed to me an unusually high level of bouncing and roughhouse-type play for her age, even compared to my other two rough-and-tumble tomboys. She loves to be held upside-down or tossed in the air. She started enjoying fast movement to varying degrees very young. Sometimes swinging her (carefully, of course!) through the air in varying directions would be the only thing that would soothe her when she cried as an infant. Just swinging her back and forth wasn't enough; it had to be multi-directional.
We tried her in an infant swing a number of times when she was younger. She loved it for about the first 3 swings each time, then got bored and wanted out. It only moved back and forth, and that wasn't stimulating enough. The only way she liked it was if one of us was there providing more stimulation--something like saying "boo" and grabbing her feet whenever she swung our direction.
Now she likes the full-body tackle and roll football/wrestling type of play.
Textures like water, grass and sand take many exposures and gradual introduction for her to start enjoying them. She used to get frightened and upset, pulling her feet and hands away and crying, when we tried to set her down in an area with grass or sand, or tried to get her to touch water. Sand terrified her for a long time.
Once she got used to the textures, though, she loved them. Now she will sit literally for hours running her hands through sand or grass, feeling it and playing with it. A bath is one of the few things that will usually calm her at least briefly even in a level 4 period.
By far her favorite thing to feel is my skin. Sometimes when she is crying I will take her hand and/or feet and rub it on my arm or cheek, and she'll calm down.
When Baby E is not feeling well, she can't sleep unless I'm touching her cheek or she has both hands on my elbows or face. Many nights I've fallen asleep next to her crib with one hand reaching through the slats to pillow her head. She'll hold my hand in both of hers, laying her cheek on it and rubbing her face and lips against it. She'll fall half asleep on my hand, but wake screaming if I try to pull it away. Often this can go on for hours--another reason she often ends up in our bed.
Things like a runny nose or something sticky or dirty on her hands bother her a lot, but paradoxically she is rarely much disturbed by a true injury. She's constantly getting bumps and bruises, and is not much fazed by them. She may cry and say "ow" for a couple of minutes, but then she'll be over it just like that, with nothing but a lump or a bruise to show for it.
Textures are very important to her, even in her food. She doesn't like anything mealy or starchy, like potatoes or squash. She doesn't like anything lumpy or grainy. She'll eat carrots raw but not cooked. She doesn't like most vegetables, cooked or raw; I'm not sure why. It's certainly not that she hasn't been offered a variety of foods.
When she was still eating apples, she'd eat apples sliced or pureed, but couldn't stand the coarser texture of regular applesauce unless it was mixed with yogurt to make it more smooth.
She likes ground beef, but only if the pieces are big enough. She doesn't like anything crumbly, and if the pieces of meat are too small she doesn't want to eat them. She doesn't like any grain smaller than rice for the same reason, unless it's ground into flour and baked into a bread-like item. Even if I feed grainy things to her on a spoon she just doesn't like the texture.
But it's not that she doesn't like picking up small things. She's always picking particles almost too tiny to see out of the carpet and handing them to me, insistent that they don't belong on the floor.
Sometimes she will entertain herself this way without much involvement from me for long minutes at a time, if I'm not keeping a close enough eye on her. She has a favorite activity for this: sitting and picking pine needles and bits of tree debris out of the rug just inside the back door. She'll pull them one by one out of the rug, put them in her mouth, and then start gagging and spitting and wanting me to help her get them off her tongue.
She'll do this over and over, mostly just with pine needles. I don't know why. The vacuum won't get all the needles out of the rug and they're constantly being tracked in, so they're always there even if I vacuum frequently.
She also likes to pull tissues out of the box and eat them if she can get hold of a box.
Some days (some green or yellow days) she'll entertain herself well for an hour or more at a time, happily playing with toys and exploring on her own, or taking things in and out of containers.
But most of the time she requires something very engaging in order to entertain herself when she feels well. I have to come up with some interesting set of objects to manipulate or puzzle for her to accomplish, and this will keep her occupied for a period of time.
Sometimes I wonder if, at least sometimes, the difference between green, yellow and orange is less in how she feels and more in the amount of attention I'm able to focus on her in a given day.
The child is extremely bright, so it's hard to find things that are engaging and challenging enough for her without being too difficult or dangerous.
She loves wooden puzzles and will try to put the pieces in their places, but doesn't quite have the skill and dexterity to turn the pieces to the right angle to actually get them into the holes. So she gets frustrated and ends up losing interest.
But then she'll play with something like a toy hairbrush for an extended period of time, brushing her own hair repeatedly and trying to brush the hair of anything else within reach.
She likes telephones, but she can tell the difference between a real phone and a toy phone, even if the real phone has the keypad locked and the toy phone is equipped with lights and noises.
She'll take the real phone, thank you very much. Woe betide anyone who tries to take it away.
She likes climbing things and sliding down things, but that's a little dangerous for her to do on her own at this age while I'm helping the other kids with schoolwork.
Basically, she requires constant attention and supervision, like most 15-month-olds. Much of this seems to me to be quite within the range of normal, if perhaps on the more sensitive and high-maintenance end of the scale.
I kind of doubt she has a "sensory integration disorder," although since it's been suggested several times I'll ask the doctor about it. I expect that whatever else is going on with her could possibly cause some sensory overload when combined with her normal higher sensitivity.
My guess is that when she's not in pain she's just a very intelligent, intense, high-energy child who is on the high end of the spectrum when it comes to sensory input and need for stimulation.
Just like her mom and two older sisters, or perhaps a bit more so.
When I read about SID, I think it all sounds pretty normal, actually. The descriptions on the pages about sensory processing disorder seem to me like they could fit just about anyone. Just about anyone in my family, anyway.
I don't think that necessarily means we all have SID.
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Posted by purple_kangaroo at 2:12 PM[Permanent link]
3 Comments:
I think it's worth asking the doctor about, but I tend to agree that E is just a highly intense child, not necessarily indicative of a sensory disorder. I mean, what child hasn't got something that they constantly rub their hands over? I know that lots of younger children often like repetetive motions, and stroking something like a favored toy is both reassuring and comforting AND a sensory experience to them.
I think E is also (and please don't take this as a slur or as a comment that you're doing anything wrong -- I don't intend it as such) very much into the "make demands of Mommy" stage. Every child goes through it, usually with their primary caregiving parent. It's 99% of the time the mother. The mother is the source of food, the source of the soothing, so of course the mother will be the first person the child tries to "control." Now, I don't think E's on a conqest for world domination or anything, but she is typically child-like in her need to have Mommy's attention. It's not a bad thing, and if you had no other children, it might not seem like too much of a demand from her. But, because you're a normal mom, you have things to do like prepare meals, clean, do laundry; in addition, you're teaching your other two as well. That's a LOT of stuff, P-K! I honestly don't know how you routinely get it all done each day. I'm lucky I walk out the door in the morning with my clothes facing the right way out, and even that's not a given. And I only have the one child!
You are doing a great job, really. I think your system of codifying her moods and the color levels is a good system. Your research with the PGR and with your allergies is enough to occupy one person without having to place care of other people into the mix as well. I'm worrying about YOU. You say you're still losing weight and I don't think you're sleeping any better. Is there any way that you can block out some you alone time? I know it will distress E to no end to not have your elbows close to hand, but you really need a day to just relax and decompress before you end up ill yourself.
I know it's got to be so hard and frustrating. Please let us know what we can do to help.
Thanks, Klee. It's hard to know how to balance things with an ill child. It's harder for me to just let her cry when I know she's not feeling well than when I know she's just mad, KWIM?
I am going to try to get an outing to myself sometime this weekend and go shopping for some clothes that actually fit.
I have not been here in a while and I mostly followed your story about Baby E's food issues through the corn forum. But, after reading this it sounds so much like my son that its uncanny. He would scream for hours if I put the wrong pajamas on him and if he was warm he would be so irritated that he could not be consoled. Unfortunately, without the words to tell me so it all just does not make sense until you start logging it.
What we did was log what he was wearing, the activity, the food, and then the reaction...for weeks. Its what finally helped us learn his triggers and learn how to adapt.
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