So, as I’ve mentioned, the Monster isn’t particularly sensory-adverse.  More often than not, he’s sensory seeking, and that’s a problem in a lot of environments.

Okay, so it’s useful when we want to do something like fireworks.  (He loves fireworks.)  On the other hand, though, this also means with his insisting on running his hands through any plants he sees, to feeling anything and everything that’s around him, to crumbling and crushing things so he can hear the sounds and feel the sensations against his palms.The one thing, though, is that he’s adverse to certain kinds of sounds.

They don’t have to be loud, though the majority of the sounds he dislikes are in the ‘loud’ category.  He’s really detests hand-driers in public restrooms, ergo why they feature so prominently in the descriptions of places we’ve visited.  He doesn’t like fans at all either and will insist that they’re turned off if he’s in a room with one.  He refuses to let us run the air purifier when he’s awake, and won’t tolerate the vacuum cleaner…

So as I write this, I’ve just discovered that the dishwasher (in close proximity) fits the same category. I happened to stop paying attention to him for a few minutes – time enough for him to get up into the kitchen and push the buttons on the machine… and silly me, having run it earlier (my wife was out for the morning), left it unlocked.  The machine itself isn’t loud, but it certainly makes enough noise on the frequencies he seems to dislike that he was not happy, and was yelling ‘cover your ears!’, which is what attracted my attention.

The real problem is that the machines that make sounds like those machines are ever expanding.

I mean… I remember, as a kid, that it was rare to have a hand-drier in a public bathroom.  That we didn’t have all of these machines that were constantly humming away in the background of our lives.  Okay, so the vacuum and I weren’t exactly friends at his age, but that was more my disliking having to do it, and the washer was rarely run while I was awake.  I just wonder, though, if the next time we have to buy appliances, if we should be looking at the volume levels of the things…