have a shower
Spray can feel like pins, steam thickens the air, and tile throws every sound back. When a shower is sensory-loud, knowing exactly how many steps remain helps. The visual support below shows them in order.
♂Shower
A person is taking a shower and washing their hair with soap.
About this visual support
Inside a shower stall, everything happens at once: temperature swings, droplets hit the skin in uneven rhythms, steam reduces visibility, and every splash of shampoo carries a scent that can't be switched off. For a sensory-sensitive child, this isn't ”just a shower” — it's four or five strong impressions stacked in a tiled echo box.
Visual support helps by lining the impressions up. With cards for ”turn on water”, ”wet hair”, ”shampoo”, ”rinse”, ”body soap”, ”turn off”, ”towel”, the time in the shower becomes finite in a way the body can actually believe. The stress of ”how much longer” eases when the end is visible on the wall.
One concrete tip: laminate the cards and place them at the child's eye level, on the wall the spray doesn't hit. When the child squeezes their eyes shut against the water, they can open them and instantly find which step comes next. To control temperature and time as well, the sequence can sit alongside a gentle timer inside Routined.