Looking for an awesome stocking stuffer for your favorite sensory seeking kiddo? Look no further! I’ve been trying out some of the coolest products with Everett this season, and I’d love to share my favorites with you. Too late to get a stocking stuffer this year? These also make great anytime gifts for those on a budget!

The Importance of Sensory Play

From birth through to early childhood, children use their senses to explore and try to make sense of the world around them. They do this by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, moving and hearing.
Children and even adults learn best and retain the most information when they engage their senses. Many of our favorite memories are associated with one or more of our senses: for instance, the smell of a summer night campfire or a song you memorized the lyrics to with a childhood friend. Now, when your nostrils and eardrums are stimulated with those familiar smells and sounds respectively, your brain triggers a flashback memory to those special times.
Providing opportunities for children to actively use their senses as they explore their world through ‘sensory play’ is crucial to brain development – it helps to build nerve connections in the brain’s pathways.
This leads to a child’s ability to complete more complex learning tasks and supports cognitive growth, language development, gross motor skills, social interaction and problem solving skills.

We often talk about the five senses. These are:

Taste – the stimulation that comes when our taste receptors react to chemicals in our mouth.
Touch – the stimulation that comes from touch receptors in our skin that react to pressure, heat/cold, or vibration.
Smell – the stimulation of chemical receptors in the upper airways (nose).
Sight – the stimulation of light receptors in our eyes, which our brains then interpret into visual images.
Hearing – the reception of sound, via mechanics in our inner ear.
However there are two others we commonly miss:

Body awareness (also known as proprioception) – the feedback our brains receive from stretch receptors in our muscles and pressure receptors in joints which enable us to gain a sense where our bodies are in space.
Balance – the stimulation of the vestibular system of the inner ear to tell us our body position in relation to gravity.

What is sensory play? 

Sensory play includes any activity that stimulates your young child’s senses: touch, smell, taste, movement, balance, sight and hearing.
Sensory activities facilitate exploration and naturally encourage children to use scientific processes while they play, create, investigate and explore. The sensory activities allow children to refine their thresholds for different sensory information helping their brain to create stronger connections to process and respond to sensory information.

Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty

Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty is a household staple here. Their putty is not only gorgeous to look at, they also make types that have cool features, such as black light reactive, scented, and magnetic. They also never dry out! #win! Everett loves making cool projects from it (such as the solar system above), and use it to practice letters and numbers.

Sensory Sack & Stretchy Dino Cape

If you’ve followed us for awhile, you know I’m a huge fan of Fun & Function. I have a few favorites that made this list, starting with their Stretchy Dino Cape and Crawl & Calm Resistance Tunnel. These are both lightweight and provide endless opportunities. Everett loves using them for dress up play, yoga, and just hiding when the outside world becomes too much. With them being so lightweight, it’s easy to pack in a go bag or even keep in the car.

Zimplikids Slime & Gellibaff

Zimplikids Slime & Gellibaff are super fun for those kids who love the extra tactile sensations of slime. We love making cool Kmart PlayTray activites, and Zimplikids makes it super easy to give them tactile stimuli while having a blast. The image above is a combination of slime and Gellibaff that we made into a fun holiday themed playtray. When the older boys were done digging around, I added dinos for Finn. Both boys enjoy a good game of playtray hide and seek. There are seriously so many fun ways to use this!

Ark Therapeutic Chews

Ark Therapeutic is such a great option for your sensory kiddos that crave oral input. These chews have been such a lifesaver for us this school year. They are helping Everett concentrate and keep his hands to himself, and helping Finn to stop biting his peers. I also love their Z-Vibe. The Z-Vibe helped Everett immensely with feeding, and just calming in general. They are also extremely well priced!

Glitter Balls

Glitter balls can be used so many ways. We like using them in obstacle courses and as an alternative to bean bags with the Give a Flip board. They are pretty to look at, light up, and really help out with improving motor skills. Finn enjoys these more than Everett, however, both boys love them!

Legacy Learning Academy

Legacy Learning Academy has too many amazing things to just pick one. They literally have something for every price & age range. The owner is a former teacher and specializes in making custom learning oriented toys and guides. Her items are all top notch and help with everything from fine motor skills to gross motor skills to just about anything your kiddos might need. They also make wooden toys, so it’s a great addition for those of you taking the Montessori/ Waldorf route.

Looking for other awesome gifts? Fun and Function created an awesome holiday gift guide that has a lot of things we love on it!

Happy holidays!

The post Budget Friendly Sensory Gifts appeared first on Not So SuperMom VS Society.

What is occupational therapy?

Occupational therapy (OT) treatment focuses on helping people with a physical, sensory, or cognitive disability be as independent as possible in all areas of their lives. OT can help kids with various needs improve their cognitive, physical, sensory, and motor skills and enhance their self-esteem and sense of accomplishment.

Everett’s Therapy Routine

Everett receives OT 1 hour every Monday from Boost Kids (Shea). Shea has also helps him with feeding therapy and yoga. In addition to Boost Kids, he also receives 1.5 hours a week in therapy services from the local school system (speech, special ed, and OT).

A lot of what Everett’s therapy looks like is play. Which is pretty awesome, because a child’s most important job is playing after all. Everett needs extra help learning the appropriate skills and social interaction techniques to interact with other people.

Shea almost always starts Everett off with an obstacle course. This is one of Everett’s favorite things to do. He even pretends to make them at home (sometimes we do our own), or if we’re taking too long to start his session, he starts the course on his own! He loves his routines!

After the obstacle course they work on a variety of things from cutting skills to catching balls. They typically spend time working at the table (with things like drawing) and time working on more physical tasks. The physical tasks usually hit on a variety of areas, for example she’ll use a peanut ball and have him stretch to grab a puzzle piece with one hand and find it’s appropriate spot. She has him rotate his hands to work on motor planning, build muscle strength, and obviously the puzzle helps with more cognitive areas. Something you may not realize is that children with autism often have poor muscle tone, which leads to issues with balance in addition to limiting their fine/ gross motor skills. This is why the physical activities she provides are so important.

These types of activities that hone Everett’s fine and gross motor skills are really helping him to catch up to his peers.

When we started with therapy, Everett had issues with things like cutting, jumping, crab walking, and blowing bubbles. It wasn’t that he was incapable of learning it, he just lacked the motor planning capabilities. Over the last year he has grown leaps and bounds. He’s even crab walking on his own!

Shea just tested him for his yearly evaluation last week. He’s in a much higher percentile and scoring almost average in some categories! I’m so proud of him and his progress. Here are a few photos from his testing process. I loved being able to watch his skills and reasoning process.

Feeding Therapy

Here are a few photos from our feeding sessions.

When we do a feeding session, it’s always 30 minutes feeding and 30 minutes yoga. Feeding Everett is a challenge. He doesn’t eat most meats, veggies, and carbs. His diet is mostly hummus, guacamole, and fruit. We discontinued feeding therapy in the fall because we thought he was doing better and he was going to therapy right after school/lunch, so getting him to eat right away was tricky. Unfortunately, it’s starting to get worse again, so it’s looking like we’ll be starting up again soon.

Yoga

Boost Kids also offers children’s yoga classes. This is such a awesome thing. Yoga helps Everett strengthen his muscles, work on breathing skills, and he LOVES it! Every once in awhile, Everett will even request yoga during a regular OT session. Shea is awesome about accommodating his requests. One of the reasons why we love going to Shea is that she really goes out of her way to make Everett happy while still helping him achieve his therapy goals.

Yoga is truly one of Everett’s favorite things now. He brings his yoga pose knowledge home and loves working on various poses at home. His favorite is tree pose!

Home Therapy

The therapy doesn’t stop at those places either, we bring it home with us and utilize it when we can. One of the reasons we love Shea, aka Boost Kids, is that she’s willing to work with me to teach me strategies to use at home. We bring in a lot of equipment, especially from our favorite sensory shop, Fun & Function.

Here are some cool items that Shea has recently helped us with (all items can be found at Fun & Function):

Here is a weighted knot ball. Everett fell in love with this at Fun & Function HQ, and I asked Shea how to best use it for Everett. She showed me how to give him a workout with it, by having him lift it up and down a couple times and by throwing it back and forth. She also used it as a weighted lap pad while he did situps. She also suggested letting him hold it during screentime.

One of our favorites, is this compression roller. It almost instantly calms Everett down and it’s so fun to look at. In addition to rolling it across his body, he also rolls it across the floor when he does “push ups.”

Another favorite is this cool marble tracker. Everett likes to twist it into puzzles/knots and solve it. Shea recommended having Everett take lead here, limited only by his imagination!

Here we have sensory twists. This was one of the ones that stumped me. They looked fun and Everett liked squishing them, but I needed some fun activites to use them with. Shea set up little cones and let him bowl with them as well as toss them on the tops of the cones. It was such a fun game and easy to recreate at home, especially for our obstacle courses! She also said it could be a fun item for bathtub sensory integration, but we haven’t tried that yet.

We incorporate a lot into Everett’s home therapy, but we also have a lot of fun too. I try to make the activites fun, sensory friendly, and a learning opportunity. I’d love to talk more about our cool sensory stations and rad therapist, but alas, it’s bedtime and the wee beasties are definitely showing their inner monsters!

The post Benefits of Therapy appeared first on Not So SuperMom VS Society.

We get a lot of questions about where we buy our rad outfits, especially for our advocacy items, so I figured today was a perfect day to showcase some of our favorites! As an added bonus, some of the shops will be having sales today and/or donating to Autism positive organizations throughout the month.

Rockin Llama Co

This shop is one of my favorites. Her clothes are fun, edgy and punk rock-esque. The owner, Kristina Kenner is so open, accepting, and kind.

Today she is offering 40% of her proceeds towards ARC (the Autism Resource Center).

Se7entees

Se7entees is a shop that’s near and dear to my heart. Their entire brand promotes inclusivity and love. The owner, Shell Asselin has littles of her own that are special needs, and she truly understands the battles we encounter and the barriers we try to break down. She takes that passion and understanding gained from her personal experience and showers it into her business-and it shows!

Today they are offering 30٪ off of all purchases with code ACCEPTANCE.

Spill The Beans

Spill the Beans has always been an advocate for special needs groups. They strive to help minorities and individuals that are struggling with various donations, auctions, and specialty clothing. The owner, Brandy Decker, has worked in inclusion classrooms with special needs children and has developed a fondness for kiddos with extra needs.

Today they are having a sale, save 30% with code AU-SOME. They are also donating a portion of all the sales from their autism line to the Autism Society. If you miss today’s sale you can use code NOTSOSUPERMOM20 to save.

Wolfe & Scamp

Wolfe and Scamp Dino Hoodies are the BEST! I had a custom made for Everett when he turned 2 and it lasted us until this year (when he grew out of it- don’t worry it’s totally going to Finn!). So when I saw she was coming out with a Neurodiversity t-rex hoodie I was ALL ABOUT THAT!

The owner Hänni Baatz, has a kiddo on the spectrum and is a huge advocate for autism acceptance. 50% of sales from her neurodiversity hoodie will be donated and you can use code SUPERMOM to save sitewide.

The Pine Torch

This is a honorable mention as it’s next on the purchase list! As per their website:

In honor of our twins, we are holding a fundraiser with our Autism tees! For Autism Awareness month, we are donating ALL PROFITS from our Autism Fundraiser tees to Autism Speaks. All tees are discounted 40% off to make them affordable for families.

I hope you found something you love on this list and are able to take advantage of these Au-some deals! All the shops mentioned in today’s blog are small shops, which are the types of places I prefer to purchase our clothes from. However, if you seem some other fantastic advocacy tees, please drop a link in the comments! I’d love to check out other brands, small or large!

The post Buy All The Things! appeared first on Not So SuperMom VS Society.