Sorry couldn't resist the title opportunity. Nothing explicit going on here folks, just battle story number 3, on how we conquered our daughters palm sensitivity.
I've mentioned in previous posts about my daughters stimming. Most of her stims are entirely harmless, she twists her fingers into weird shapes, twirls her hair, pulls on her clothing etc. Some of her stims are quite distressing, she will pinch her leg repeatedly and she scratches in her hair line, the back of her neck and shoulders, and she will do this until she's bleeding regardless of how short her nails are kept. ( we won't get into nail trimming trauma here) I can tell a fair bit about how she's doing, by what she is doing, with her hands. For example hand splaying.
Hand splaying is what clued her therapy team and I into her palm sensitivity. I was having a devil of a time getting Tiger to participate in any sort of art play. Anytime she got things on her hands she would splay and scream until her hands were washed off. I completely misinterpreted this as an OCD cleaning issue, blaming myself for having always kept her spotless, washing her face and hands instantly should she get them dirty, ( the ocd one is me eh). Anyways the RT was trying to get Tiger to make shapes in some sand and getting nowhere when she saw the stimming and called the OT in to observe. Sure enough when we brought my Tigers hands up to the bin she would splay and pull back.
Sometimes I tell ya, I can be so dense. The palm sensitivity diagnosis instantly answered a lot of questions for us, like why she wouldn't use utensils, hold the crayons, why she wanted papertowel wrapped around her popsicle stick etc. Seriously the fact that it took almost 2 and half years to clue into this is ridiculous, but live and learn. I won't beat myself up too much as I've also previously stated Tigers behaviour changes day to day, so maybe it was the inconsistency of her responses that kept us from figuring it out sooner. But as you can tell the palm sensitivity spilled into a lot of areas.
Self care, feeding, playing, creative outlets etc. It was a big deal.
Anyways back to the battle plan. The cure for palm sensitivity is patience. Well maybe not cure but tool for dealing with, reducing or mitigating might be better terms.
Patience, is a virtue I do not possess in quantity, but for my daughter I will do anything. That meant spending days introducing new textures to her little hands and trying out all different sizes, shapes and even different materials for her cutlery.
Guess what, Ikea makes some heavy rounded stainless steel cutlery that is HEAVY. Tiger still uses it.
Coloured rice was a killer it took days before I could get her to try it out. But we persevered and kept at it, I let her have a cloth by her Rubbermaid so she could wipe her hands as much as needed. I took full advantage of her love of dump and fill and gave her water to mix with whatever new material I had in the bin. Her RT also joined in the act using different materials to make shapes, letters and numbers. At night I would ham it up for Tiger creating stories that included texture descriptions and samples of dragon scales, unicorn horn and troll hair. I have a whole series of stories I made up for her about Ruby The Red Dragon.
Slowly but surely the need to wipe her hands and the splaying subsided.
Tigerlily still prefers to keep her hands clean but she will get fantastically dirty now and boy does she ever love sand and mud.
I'm calling the battle won.
The High Functioning Life, where not washing your hands can make a mama proud.
HFL Mama
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