Sensory issues

I'd thought that Rosie didn't have many sensory issues, but a recent spate of them has proven that thought wrong. Before a holiday gathering at someone's house, she grew very agitated, worried about the crowd of people, the family's dogs, and obsessed with the idea that no one would want to play with her. She found the car seat too hard, her shoes too tight, and her fur-lined sweatshirt jacket unwearable because of the hard plastic zipper. She couldn't wear her jeans and had to switch to sweatpants; the tags in her underthings were too scratchy. We could not wash her face at all and the light was too bright. We ended up not going. On Christmas day, overwhelmed by guests and noise, she finally withdrew and sat on the couch hypnotically rubbing a soft piece of foam across her nose and cheeks. Which looked soothing even to me, actually. She tried to use the foam to settle her young cousin down by rubbing it on his face, but he wasn't having any of it.

I have to consider whether it's holiday excitement overall that is raising her level of sensitivity (on just about everything, not just sensory issues) but I find myself wondering if she is, as her grandmother asked us, "getting worse." It certainly seems as though last year we didn't encounter these things - or perhaps if we did, I dismissed them as overexcitement and whinyness in a somewhat high-strung kid. I think that school is much more stressful for her this year than last, though, even without the bullying, and perhaps it can contribute to her overall tension even during the holiday break.

On the up side, relatives are encouraging her interests, and she got an avalanche of science-related gifts for Christmas. She's in absolute nirvana, growing tadpole shrimp in a tank (though she had to read the directions to be convinced that they were not, in fact, sea monsters per the box), looking at blood cells and live bacteria under her new microscope, taking digital time-lapse photos of the cat, putting together electrical circuits to light a bulb. She even steeled herself to play Operation despite the horrible buzzer, once she realized that it was an electrical circuit that closed the buzzer connection.