Spilled Juice? Learning to Handle the Unexpected

Imagine you're dressed for work and need to leave the house in 20 minutes. You're about to sit down for breakfast as you shake the orange juice container. Then suddenly you're soaked, as the cap flies into the air and juice rains down all over you, the counter and the floor. What would your immediate response be? I can just imagine! Then, what steps would YOU take to clean up the mess quickly and get on with your breakfast ... assuming you still have an appetite. Given these circumstances, it would be an extremely difficult situation for anyone to deal with. For Marisa, who this actually did happen to, it was overwhelming, setting her off into a major meltdown involving a fist dance and verbally persevering on friends she remembers from her past in order to block out what was happening at the moment.

The best case scenario I thought of at that moment was to talk Marisa through the problem and help her to realize what to do first, next and last in this particular situation, as I went about cleaning her, the counter and the floor. In other words, "first clean up yourself with paper towels, then wipe down the counter top and sides, and last wipe up the floor with paper towels followed by a more thorough cleaning with the mop and pail of detergent and water." This was exactly how it happened, but Marisa did not help one bit, as she stood there doing her fist dance and reciting names of friends from her past. That being the case, she obviously didn't hear anything I was saying, in the calmest voice I could, about the steps to cleaning up.

So how can I help Marisa to learn the steps to cleaning up an unexpected kitchen mess, when she is having a major meltdown and is completely unable to focus on what I'm telling her to do?

Visuals have always been helpful for Marisa as they are for many children with autism. I think that it will be worth a try to create a chart entitled, Kitchen Mess Cleanup, record the steps with pictures, and then create messy situations for Marisa to clean up. Now I'm not totally crazy, and I'm not going to go so far as to spill juice all over Marisa and the floor, but it might be worth while to spill some water and allow her to follow the steps to clean up.

Like learning to cook, clean up dishes, do laundry, or straighten one's bed in the morning, cleaning up a messy kitchen accident is another thing to learn. However, because it is unexpected, and not part of a regular routine in which one learns through repetition, it becomes much more difficult to learn. So while I'm at it, maybe I should make a chart for my whole family. And in time, wouldn't it be nice to see Marisa telling someone else in the family how to clean up their own unexpected kitchen mess. "Oops, here's what to do ..."