String... String... STRING!!!

When my brother Uncle Schnirelmann and I were kids, we had a silly little in-joke game called "string."

I'm not sure how it started, but it involved feigning a fixation on string. Think zombies moaning for "Braaains!" Our signature moan went along the lines of: "String... striiiing...STRIIIIING!!"



Then we'd greedily grab and pretend to obsessively play with whatever piece of string triggered the joke.

Well, the joke's on me, my friends.

Joy's hair-pulling stimmy activities didn't come out of nowhere. The dimmer-switch has actually been sliding for quite a while.

It started with dolly hair, as far as I can tell. My Little Ponies. American Girls. Barbies. Most of which, by the way, belonged to Rose. Miss Rose has been generous with the ponies, but the others have been rather a cause of contention.

Then it spread to other stringy things. She started picking up hair and fuzzy bits from the carpet, and gravitating to toys with strings. Here's what her OT reported on the subject on March 18:

Joy was really drawn to stimming activities today. It seems like every where there was a string for her to twist in her fingers. It was me against 10,000 pieces of string!

The hair-pulling seems a natural extension (though I guess you can't wear extensions if you don't have any hair there to begin with...) Here's from Lynda's daycare report yesterday:

She was putting a lot of energy into looking for strings. I took a couple toys out of the room that have strings. Ones she knows are always on the shelf. Even if I turn the toy so the string isn't visible, she knows it's there and will pull the toy out to get to the string. I tried substituting a squish ball thingy that [the OT] had brought for her a while back. She would play with it a few minutes, then go back to tracking down string. A couple good clumps of hair came out when strings weren't readily available.

Joy's been wearing a little pink hoodie-sweatshirt today, to pretty good effect so far. I so very much appreciate all the words of wisdom and encouragement on last night's post! It all feels somewhat more manageable this morning. My best guess is that the dimmer switch will eventually slide the other direction, as it has with many other less-than-desirable behaviors and stimmies.

I still see a potential buzzcut looming in the future, though -- if not as a preventative approach, then in service of evening things up when the hair starts to grow back in! Pixiemama, I don't "do" Facebook, but I bet your shaved head was adorable! Auntie RatM has even more extensive shaved-head/buzzcut experience. Makes her more aerodynamic and all.

Hey brother mine: "String... striiiing...STRIIIIING!!"