Alternative Free Bean Bag Stuffing

When your child has sensory needs trying to figure out what chair will help them be comfortable enough to sit can be a challenge. We've tried a number of types of chairs trying to figure out what works for our kids. We tried camp chairs, mushroom chairs, bungee chairs, stools, plastic lawn chairs, wooden benches, plastic benches, computer chairs, wood ladder back chairs, leather couches, antique couches, micro fiber couches, metal folding chairs, exercise balls, and bean bags.

After a lot of experimenting for our kids the chair with the best results was the bean bag chair.Bean bags are very comfortable to sit in, wonderful for kids with sensory needs and just fun to sit in. They do, however, come with some downsides. They deflate fairly quickly when you have kids who like to run and jump into them.

We have in the past bought refills for the bean bags. However, when you refill the bags the beads go everywhere and it takes forever to get it cleaned up. In addition, it costs almost as much to buy the refills as it does to buy a new bag. It's frustrating to have to choose between buying a new bag every year or dealing with the mess of refilling the bag. We could just not have the bean bags and just avoid the issue all together. However, the way a bean bag gives sensory input is great for our kids needs ... especially when they are overloaded.

bead mess

So what do you do when your kids have loved another chair till it was like a flat pancake and you don't have the money for a new bag or for the refill??? You look for another way to refill the bean bag. I read other blogs and watched YouTube videos and couldn't find any solutions that didn't cost money.

Finally, one day I was watching a video on alternative pillow stuffing and I saw someone stuff a pillow with plastic sacks. I thought, well I have plenty of those but will it be comfortable and will it make a noise that bothers their senses? So one day I added some plastic bags to her chair and had her sit on them and there were no sensory problems. 

I spent six months filling that bean bag with plastic sacks after shopping and she loved that she could keep using her bean bag. In the mean time, I was thinking about how badly the bag needed to be washed. In the past this was not an option because who wants to dump out all those beads to clean something that will probably need washed again the next day because she does almost everything in that chair. Then it occurred to me that most of the chair was plastic sacks not beads. So I emptied what was left of the beads and bags out, mess and all and washed her bean bag.  It took 8 hours to get all the beads off the plastic sacks I had stuffed in her chair and now I feel good that I will never have to mess with the beads again because I threw the beads away. I can just keep stuffing her chair with bags and when I need to wash her chair it will take no time at all to empty out the sacks, wash it and re-stuff it. All for free. So if you have the patience to wait and stuff in your left over grocery sacks you can re-stuff your bean bag for free. The only thing I would have done differently was to have emptied out the beads at the beginning instead of having to get the beads off the plastic sacks later.

   

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