As you may know, I love to read about all things related to parenting. Sometimes that is a good thing, and other times it just gets me into trouble. Yesterday, I was reading about how important it is for children to engage in “sensory play” or “messy play”.
When I started reading about bags and boxes filled with fun things to squish, pour, sort, and explore I became worried. Was everyone else out there already doing this with their toddlers? Have I been depriving Dylan of something important for months or years? Why hadn’t I thought to do anything like the creative, colorful, messy things that I was seeing? I got myself all worked up and went to bed determined to fill the next day with sensory delights.
This morning, after breakfast, Dylan and I were in the kitchen. I remembered that I was on a mission to delight his senses, and I remembered that dried beans were a suggestion for a sensory play item. I remembered that I had some beans in the cupboard, so I took out three plastic cups to put the beans in. I mixed black beans with white beans in one cup and left the other two cups empty so that Dylan could sort them.
I placed the cups on Dylan’s play kitchen and I stood back and waited for the fun to begin. He peeked into the cup where the beans were. He looked at me confusedly and said, “Mama, why beans?” I told him that the beans were his to play with, and he could do fun things with them like sort them into the other two cups or feel them with his fingers. He started pouring them back and forth. Before long, I could see and hear beans falling on the floor. I had forgotten to put the beans in a bin. Many of the activities that I had seen involved a bin or table of some kind. I directed him to take the beans outside and I brought out a bin for him to put the beans and cups into.
Before long, the beans were all over the deck. Perhaps I should have put down a tablecloth or something first. Either way, I feel like my first foray into sensory play was somewhat of a flop. Dylan did not seem as excited about the beans as with the other things that we do almost daily – walking in the woods, playing in mud, and riding his bike. Of course, as we walked away from the mess of beans on the deck to go play in the woods I realized that many of the things that we do every day probably fall under the umbrella of “sensory play”, and I felt rather silly indeed.