We have been using the park after school as a good strategy for getting/staying regulated. Just going and camping out with a meal for a few hours, til it’s close to bedtime.
But on this particular day, everybody was too dysregulated for that to even work, or be safe.
We came home instead. The kids played their iPads in separate rooms from one another for a little while.
Then I decided to set up an activity, just an offer, so my husband could cook dinner and the house be quiet. I scrounged through the cabinets for whatever weird/interesting shaped trays we had access to. I put down drops of food coloring, then covered them over with baking soda (bicarb soda). I poked holes in the lids of a couple of empty bottles, and filled them with a 50/50 water and white vinegar mixture. I also put some 50/50 water and white vinegar in a little bowl with a little teaspoon. (If I had pipettes or syringes, I’d have added those, but we ordered some and they haven’t arrived yet.)
[Image descriptions:
The first two images show how I set up a baking tray by putting tin foil on it as a liner, squirting drops of food coloring on it, and covering it with baking soda.]
Then I wordlessly carried all the materials outside to the porch and put them down.
My kids got curious. “What are we supposed to do?”
“It’s an experiment. So, experiment, I guess.”
I let them experiment awhile; once they could ask more specific questions I explained what the components were, how it would fizz, etc.
I chose this activity for a couple of reasons. The obvious is just that it’s interesting and engaging, but there are more reasons than that, that I chose it for my kids in this stage specifically:
1. My kids have been feeling very very disempowered, and reacting age-appropriately: by grabbing for power every which way humanly possible. They say 50 times a day, “No, I can do whatever I want.” While we work through that in every iteration that it’s affecting our lives currently, it was great to set up a play activity where that was genuinely true.
The play morphed over time, and differentiated by kid. I’ll touch on that more in a sec. But what it meant was that they both kept having new ideas, new ideas, new ideas. They checked in with me about a few of them and I kept reiterating, “Sure, it’s an experiment. You just do stuff that your brain thinks of, and see what happens.”
At one point my daughter specifically said, “I can do whatever I want?” And I said “Yes! When you’re playing, you can do whatever you want.” (I know that’s a simplification, but trust that it worked for this conversation in this time 😊)
2. This play differentiated well for both my kids and what they need right now.
My daughter, an intense sensory seeker, has been dumping stuff out lately (soap all over the porch, beard balm all over her hair, soda all over the floor…) While we’ve had to intensify our supervision of her all the time, this was a chance for her to dump whatever, smear whatever, splash whatever and it was fine. It took about 3 minutes of “calm” play before she had every color blended together into a fizzy paste that she was dipping her feet in. And that was completely fine.
She also got other intense sensory elements from it. Tactile from smearing the paste on herself. Strong smell from the vinegar. I cautioned her that the vinegar and baking soda didn’t taste good to me, but she licked copious amounts of them. She really likes strong smells and tastes and often mouths unusual things. I think she liked the gritty texture of the baking soda, on her skin and in her mouth. It’s more challenging to find strong smelling activities that don’t overwhelm me, but this one worked well.
My son is more cautious and methodical. While my daughter was dumping muddled fizzy liquid all over herself, he was tracing slow, careful, rainbow swirls in a tray full of baking soda, watching and listening quietly to the gentle fizzing sound it left in its wake. Long after she had jumped to her feet and gone off to dump colorful vinegar sludge into a bucket and spray it with the hose, he was still examining the patterns and colors he could create, taking tiny spoonfuls of vinegar and adding it to the baking soda wherever he saw fit to fizz.
The game changed: we got out a kiddie pool and a hose, rinsed off all the dishes, turned the tin foil lining the trays into boats. Then the kids took turns spraying each other and spraying arcs in the air to run under the water, negotiating and discussing without screaming and fighting.
(The colors rinsed right off the porch for us. Of course, be careful anytime you’re using dyes, your experiences may vary.)
