Most of the time, the Monster’s actually fairly good about sensory sensitivity.

We’ve taken him to bull riding, the ren-faire, ball games… nothing really phases him when it comes to most sounds.  On the other hand, lately, he’s been showing increasing sensitivity to a certain set of sounds – fans.

He’s never liked certain kinds of fans – I’ve noticed that he’s always gotten antsy when the vacuum has been employed in the few places in our house that involve carpeting, so we try to do it when he’s not in the room or he’s wholly out of the house.  He’s never been a huge fan of the ceiling fan in his bedroom, but I’d chalked that up to the weird noise that it makes at that medium gear.  (He likes the one in our room well enough.)

And then there’s the fans you find in bathrooms – the vent fan in smaller ones, and hand-driers in larger ones.

Now, I’m aware that he’s kind of iffy about the hand-driers, and have taken steps to get around it when we’ve had to so that he’ll use the bathroom.  (Mostly, trying to just cover his ears enough to let him do his business.)  And when possible, we’ve ended up using a family restroom so that he doesn’t have to put up with the sudden noise.

On the other hand, though, I picked him up from Parents’ Day Out yesterday to find out that he’d refused to use their bathroom on account of the fan…which can potentially be a bigger problem in the long run since he’s going to have to use restrooms that do have those fans.

It’s almost enough for me to consider getting him noise-dampening headphones finally, just for that, to see if we can’t get him to ease up…