The Great Snow Freak Out

Once a sensory kid, always a sensory kid.

Marissa had a memorable encounter with a patch of snow yesterday. It snowed last weekend, and seeing as how we do not have boots and snow pants for her yet (I seem to go shopping for them after everybody else on the planet already has), we did not take her out in it.

Yesterday was a nice day in the high 50s and Marissa was itching to get out and about in the backyard. Because of the way our house is positioned, every time it snows, most of it melts pretty quickly except for one strip in our backyard near our back fence. I decided to take Marissa to that spot to see how she would react with the snow.

She was a little hesitant to walk in it at first but quickly overcame that and started running around in it. The problem arose when she slipped, fell forward onto her hands and was forced to touch the snow with her bare skin.

See for yourself what transpired:

Now, I know that even though Marissa was discharged from OT during the Summer, she still has lingering sensory issues. We try to keep her acquainted with her biggest icky sensory substances such as sticky, goopy, crumby, foamy, creamy and so on. We have learned that once she "conquers" a substance, she will regress if we don't push her to keep touching it. This happened recently with her feeding therapy. She had been taking some bites of a biter biscuit and it was leaving crumbs on her tray. Apparently, we hadn't worked with crumbs in a while because she looked at her hands with all the crumbs on them and started to gag.

We just need to stay on top of her sensory processing issues and keep her acquainted with all the "yucky" stuff. The good news is that once she conquers something, as long as we keep her touching it on a regular basis, she tolerates touching it very well.

In fact, after she recovered from her snow incident on the good ol' patio swing, she was begging to go back out to the snow patch!

This is her requesting to go back out to the yucky snow patch.

Several times while we were out there, it looked like she was going to reach down and touch the snow again. She never did and I didn't feel like pushing her but she sure contemplated it.
I am so proud of my brave girl. I can't imagine how scary it must be sometimes to have sensory processing issues. She is so brave to push herself to overcome them.

I just pray that Mother Nature cooperates with us this Winter and gives us enough of the white, fluffy, yucky stuff to keep pushing Marissa's thresholds.