Noise Putty

On Saturday, a relative of mine bestowed a completely kid-centric gift on each of my kidlets: noise putty. For those who have never heard of such a thing, consider that it's this nasty, goopy concoction that resides inside a small plastic jar. Sticking one's hands into this disgusting mess produces a sound that one would typically blame on the dog. After just a few minutes of listening to my kidlets playing with this mess, I gave up on calling it noise putty and have since called it "fart putty."

Pig Jr., in particular, loves his fart putty. He could spend hours just sticking his hands in and out of that noisy concoction. This honestly baffles me. The boy hates to touch anything wet, slimy, or otherwise not dry. Noise putty is wet, slimy, and feels so horrific to me that the one occasion a kidlet managed to get me to touch it (by dropping it on my lap), I felt the need to wash my hands three zillion times just to get the sensation off my skin. The fact that my sensory kidlet cannot keep his hands off of the same object makes no logical sense to me at all since he is generally more grossed out by sensations than I am.

Needless to say, Pig Jr. decided this was what he was going to bring into school for show-and-tell this week.

I decided to be proactive in my apology to my son's preschool teacher. In his parent/teacher journal, I wrote the following: "I apologize in advance for [Pig Jr.'s] show and tell, but I was so impressed he was willing to touch that stuff, I let him bring it in!" Her response was to simply initial the note to let me know she read it.

After school on Tuesday, I asked Pig Jr. what his teacher thought of his show and tell. He told me, "She liked it! It's fart putty. She had to like it. It sounds like farts!" Um, okay.

I'm wondering whether or not this is going to come back to haunt me at the meeting I will have to attend to find out the results of his evaluations this spring. There's nothing quite like being a parent facing a whole slew of IEP team members and having to justify why your child brought noise putty to school when you're trying to convince them he hates touching things like that under normal circumstances. Hey, it's not my fault not everything goopy and disgusting makes rude noises at my son. I might stand a better chance of getting him to touch other items if they did.