Sensory Bins

So many things to write about, so little time - between work and NICU and daycare woes, it's challenging finding time to sleep! There are more changes afoot here, which I'll say more about when the plan is more clear, but for now, we're just muddling along. I still have to write about finally (after all the insanity this summer) getting Acorn out on the bike, and about pumping and breastfeeding, and about daycare too. Acorn is getting the stoma (hole) from his trach sewn shut next week, so maybe there will be time to write then.

I'm home with Acorn today - he's got Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease. The pediatrician said he could go back to daycare as long as he was fever free (and since we know he got it there because half the class had it 2 weeks ago, that doesn't bother me), but the daycare said he couldn't come back if he was getting new spots....and with this morning's level of crankiness, there was no sense in even trying it.

Our homeschooling totschool/preschool work ground to a halt without the support of nurses over the last year, but there are still things I want to do with Acorn (and with Leaf),  so we're just going to move forward as time permits.

Over nap time, I put together our first sensory bin (and this post!). I'm hoping to do a theme twice a month for now, to give Acorn something interesting to do other than the TV - he's totally fixated on it, largely because of nurses who played videos instead of doing other things we'd offered up.

Our theme for the rest of October is Halloween?Samhain.

First, since I'm working on a budget, I started with a dish pan I've owned for more than a decade, and the last of our white rice (about 6 cups; we could use more for this in the future - I see a Costco run in my future).

I debated buying birdseed for this, but I'm thinking I'll do that for next month. I also thought about making colored rice, but I can't help but think that one of these days I'm going to want to put 2 colors together, and then what will I do, sort through them all grain by grain to separate the colors again?

I then got all of our little bits and pieces together for this theme:

There's also a pair of big tweezers going in here, and possibly orange and black pompoms if I can remember where I hid them. 

Finally, I threw it all together:

Not bad for a first attempt done with almost no planning, don't you think?