The Frog and the Train
A little story as to how Sue and I realised we should join forces and share what we know and have learned by training others.
Sue was the Playmaker at our local children’s hospice, and I was a Playmaker’s Assistant, learning the immense power of play for children with life threatening or life limiting conditions. Encouraging individuality and play opportunity in a world that is dominated by medical interventions is always a challenge. It’s easy to lose sight of how important ‘me’ time is – every child has a right to play.
Building a suitcase of resources to be able to facilitate those ‘me’ times is vital – and exciting! It’s impossible to visit a charity shop without a rummage for anything that might possibly have a play value. But on this occasion, we were both able to visit a Sensory Fair in London where all companies, with all things sensory were exhibiting. Sometimes idea collecting is as rewarding as purchasing – especially if something can be recreated using recycled materials.
We wondered off in different directions, exploring, testing, observing, touching, smelling, squeezing, bouncing, blowing, tapping – in other words completely immersing ourselves in a sensory playground.
When it was time to leave, we pottered off to the station along with all the Friday night commuters keen to get home for the start of the weekend. Sue happily admits to her inability to find her way back to her starting point, and it is always with a gentle sigh of relief on my part when we have navigated underground and overground routes to find ourselves safely back at Waterloo and on a seat next to each other. It was a very crowded carriage.
We were keen to share each other’s experiences, and show our purchases. So, we both got out of our bags our favourite item. It happened to be exactly the same thing – a little green squishy frog with a very broad smile. Being squishy, it was impossible not to squeeze, but unbeknown to me the smiling frog’s eyes would pop up and wobble when squeezed. That tickled me and made me laugh out loud. It was one of those moments when it became impossible to control my mirth to the point of snorts and much eye watering. Sue was the same, and because we had lost the ability to speak, we used our frogs and their range of squeezed expressions as our communication tool. Communicative, imaginative role play with hilarity and fun.
However, the ripple of the humour and fun was slowly spreading throughout the carriage. The two young trainee barristers sharing our table stopped their debrief of their day in court and joined in. Looking up we could see more and more passengers sneaking a look above their laptops and smiling. The smiling was infectious and spread, and lasted for most of the journey back to Poole. The challenge was not to smirk at two women in their late 50’s laughing with joy at something so simple. But so engagingly visual and simple……
It struck us both that by creating that flow of communication through simple play was powerful. Spread a little happiness couldn’t have been demonstrated any better!