On Tuesday Tom celebrated Pancake Day with the rest of us. Similarly to last year Tom made pancakes, and then we used them in messy play.
Tom is very good at using his switch in the kitchen to activate the Kitchen Aid, he knows when to mix and he also knows when its best not to press the button or else I will get covered I egg or whatever else (this however does not stop him!). I encourage Tom to use his switch independently now and most of the time he will, he rarely needs my help, I encourage and support but I am now able to let Tom take charge of the activity.
Once Tom mixed the mixture, I cooked them for him, I am no chef so I needed Tom to tell me exactly what to do, and he did this very well! Tom made lots of delicious pancakes for us to enjoy.
Then to add some sensory aspect to the pancakes, we did messy play using them.
I gave Tom a plain pancake to explore first, they are a pretty weird texture to explore and I had let them cool enough but they were still warm so Tom enjoyed this experience. Then we added some popular pancake toppings on top. This years topping of choice was Nutella and cinnamon sugar. These two ingriediants are both very sensory and Tom enjoyed playing with them. We both got absolutely covered in Nutella and it was a lot of fun!
Just because Tom can't eat the pancakes, he does not miss out on any of the fun, we make sure that he celebrates the same things as everyone else, we just do it in Tom's way!
A short blog post this week, but I hope it shows how we give Tom the opportunity to explore every celebration even those sourounding food. We get a lot of people comment on the fact Tom isn't able to eat orally, for some it seems as though they are sad about it, but you can't miss what you don't know, and actually food can be much more fun to play with anyway, I hope this blog post is able to show that.