Trying to provide amazing experiences, especially around the holidays, for kids with extra needs is sometimes a daunting experience. Sometimes there is no way that I can adapt it to our needs but sometimes, after many hours of creativity ( and pintrest!) I come up with a GENIUS way to make it work.
Because of Tyler’s visual impairment and sensory issues there are a few things that we can cross off our list at Holiday times. We found at Christmas that he had some major anxiety issues that went hand in hand with seizures so now that we were getting those worked out we wanted this holiday to be just fun.
I couldn’t figure out what to do. There was no way that we could handle going to a large Easter egg hunt because him being put in the “right” age group is pretty much insane. Plus asking them to put a almost 7 year old with the 3 year old looks pretty silly as well. So we did what any Auntie would do. I text ed my husbands sisters with kids and asked if they wanted to participate in a Visually friendly, immunocompromised/immunosupressed Easter egg hunt. ( AKA just us, no extra germs, that I can adapt to our needs and still make it fun) My Sister in laws kids are the same age and younger than Tyler so it works really well. Though they opted not to, we went to our second option.... THE KIDS!! ( Kayden, Koy and Lexi) We invited Max and Morgan but they had a funeral to attend.
As soon as I asked my Sister in law if they wanted to do it I bought the stuff to make some pretty awesome eggs with no candy since 2 of the kids don’t prefer candy and had stuffed eggs with cars, crayons, princess stuff. When they opted not to do it, I took out that stuff and just put in my left over change. Probably a good ten bucks worth. I bought a 70 count egg basket and we opted to just have Kayden and Koy and Tyler look for eggs. Lexi got a steal of a deal with CASH eggs but she had to work extra hard.
The 70 eggs that i purchased had a variety of color. I picked 3 colors out and made sure we had equal amounts of each. Then I found 3 different types of sports eggs and made equal ones of those. Those are the ones we hid for the kids.
Instead of making a bunch of eggs and saying have at it. We told them you can only collect your color of egg. We were able to hide the eggs according to skill level and vision level and all had a wonderful time.
Ty came home with 27 eggs and each egg was hidden to just the right level of him. The others had the same experience and they all enjoyed the left over change I had and not one quarrel of to many eggs were had.
To experience the excitement of coloring eggs, we let him go at it. We let there be a mess. We let him re dye the eggs 3 different times. We do whatever he wants. He even gets to use his hands. Because really, who cares. He will remember when we did the eggs exactly how he wanted them to be.
2 comments:
I think it is awesome that you figured out how to tailor the egg hunting to the needs of the children involved. Letting them have as much fun as regular kids and them not knowing it was any different from what the regular kids do. Actually I think the making them choose the egg by color makes it more difficult and would be an awesome idea for others.
Sorry The Labrum's couldn't make it :( The funeral was nice (I guess for a funeral??) If I would have known there was money in them, I may have come down :) he he. Were there any BIG BILLS? $50's ? It looks like you had a lot of fun!
Post a Comment