As I read more about Cortical Visual Impairment I’m finding so many awesome things to sooth my little savage beast! Children with CVI can become very overwhelmed with lots of stimuli. If the noise level is too high, the light is too bright or low, if there is a lot of action going on in the house, clutter, and anything else we may think is just normal day to day life. For them it can be unbearable.
Today was one of those “crazy days” where she was angry and lashing out from the moment I went in the room this morning. It continued through until about 1:00pm when she finally just gave out and fell asleep. While she was sleeping, I was reviewing in my mind some of the reasons she was so upset. When I’m in the moment with her, I tend to just react and try to make things better. I end up making it worse because it seems like I can’t please her. She was hitting herself, hitting me, throwing things, yelling “NO!” for no reason. Why the hell was she so agitated? So, as the little angel is a sleep, I closed my eyes and just tried to remember the room and what I did, how I approached her, what she ate, and so on. The curtain was already down, so that wasn’t the problem. Then I thought it was the fact that she has literally had to stay in her room over the last five days because everything has been moved in preparation of more floors being laid. I don’t think it was that either, because she never indicated she even wants to leave the room. She can indicate by going up to the gate and grunting with her arm extended…meaning “I want to go there.” She hasn’t done that at all. As a matter of fact she has been a little more calm (except for today) and sweet this week. So what the hell was it? I continued to think about it and realized that there was clutter in her room and also in her crib. She had far too many things in her crib. How did it get there? LOL She put the stuff in her crib last night before going to bed. She knew it was “night night time” and started loading up the crib with stuff. I thought it was the cutest thing ever and it never dawned on me that the clutter in her crib may be a problem. Second…when I took her out in the morning, she had breakfast and while she was eating, I was cutting out all the pictures in her chubby books and her flash cards so that I could glue felt to the back and make a black felt board. I wanted to try placing one thing on the black felt board for her to see. After she was done eating, she started to pick up all the flash cards I wasn’t using and throwing them everywhere. She was getting more irritated as she was throwing them. She became down right destructive after that. We keep a comforter on the floor for a little extra comfort, her booster seat and tray are in there as well as her rocking chair and the piano bench. Oh and lets not forget the TV and cabinet, her dresser and crib. Hmmm???? Ya think the room was a little cluttered? By the time she was done throwing things everywhere, there wasn’t any floorspace left! I took my little cutting project out of the room, made her a bottle and put her to bed. She was burnt out.
When she woke from her nap, she was pissed off. It was the same as this morning ONLY WORSE! Not only was her crib cluttered, but now the whole room too. I talked about it with Dom and we both went into the room. We cleaned it all up, took non-essential things out of the crib, and Voila! a different child emerged. She was smiling, sweet, engaging and funny. We always knew we needed to keep things simple with her, but now we see how essential it truly is. While she was napping this afternoon, I finished up making the felt board and gluing all the objects to pieces of felt so that I could display them one at a time. She didn’t respond as well to them as I would have liked. I don’t know if they were too small, but the only ones she would shout for joy over were the shapes I made out of Mylar. I made diamonds, squares, circles, rectangles and triangles and that is what she wanted. I put all the shapes and pictures into a bucket and Simmi would go to the bucket and only pick out the Mylar shapes. She would move her hand around the bucket and if she saw one of those little shiny shapes, she would take it. She became obsessed with them and did not want to put them away. She wasn’t interested AT ALL in anything else in the bucket. I spent hours cutting out the objects and gluing them to felt and then cutting out the felt. I’ll need to find more things I can make with Mylar. One idea I have is to go to the Dollar Store and just pick out lots of cool Mylar balloons and then cut out those shapes and pictures on there.
Anyway, I had no idea just how essential having things very clutter free will modify her behavior. Her room is usually very simple. I don’t have anything on the walls, and she enjoys the stars on the ceiling. With all the other things that have made their way into her room I can see how this would irritate her. It was an overload of sorts.
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