Toddler fears

Thomas is starting to be afraid of things. It's interesting to see the logic and survival advantage of some of his fears -- and the random insanity of others.

A while back I worried on here about how to get him not to touch the radiators. He put his hand on one accidentally a couple days after they came on, just for a second. He wasn't burned, but he was frightened. Now, about twenty times a day, he points at the radiator in whatever room he's in and says, "AAAA!", looking at us. We say, "Yes, that's hot. It's a radiator. We shouldn't touch it," and he confirms this: "AAA!" Very seriously. Like he wants to make sure we know to watch out for that thing. It's scary, mama. Don't touch it. Occasionally he wobbles unsteadily from room to room, pointing out each of the radiators in turn: "AAAA!" Good survival fear, right?

On the other hand, about two weeks ago he was starting to get pretty dry overnight in his room and the cheapo humidifier I bought last winter wasn't cutting it. Matt did a ton of research and bought him a nice one online. Warm mist, automatic something, humid-de-whatsit, and a lot of other nice buzzwords. It really is great. (I want one for our room now.) But the first time we set it up we set the humidity setting wrong somehow and instead of shutting off when it got to 40 percent humidity or whatever we thought we'd set it at, it just kept going. It humidified at an alarming rate! In fact the warm mist condensed on the ceiling and ran across it, where it dripped all over the room.

Naturally, sleeping in a tropical rain forest (recall that it was also 85 degrees) came as a surprise to Thomas. He woke up and one of us retrieved him to go back to sleep in our bed. This is a normal occurrence so we didn't think much of it. We put him back to bed after he fell asleep and he woke up again. It wasn't till I went into his room to sleep on the floor (he likes this) that I realized I was being rained on. Then I noticed that Thomas's bed, being under the runoff zone for the aforementioned ceiling-river, was very wet. At that point we adjourned to the adult bedroom for the rest of the night.

Now, ever since that night Thomas has been ambivalent about sleeping in his crib. He'd rather sleep on the mattress on the floor of his room (if he can't have our bed, that is). We're thinking about taking the crib out for good and letting him have his bed on the floor for a trial and see how it goes. But that wasn't the point of this post, was it? No.

The point of the post was the next day, when I tried to put Thomas down for a nap, he suddenly started screaming. I couldn't figure out what was wrong and I pulled out all my normal mama tricks to reassure him, but it just wasn't working. Suddenly I realized he wasn't just screaming, he was screaming at something, something in his crib. It was a stuffed gazelle, part of the mobile that hangs over his bed. I picked it up. He wailed and pointed at it. I offered it to him, gently (this is how we've been handling new fears -- occasionally he just takes the thing and stops being afraid of it). He pulled his hand away. I had to take it away and hide it. Then put him back to sleep. I told Matt I thought it had fallen into his bed when the water was dripping all over him. Maybe it hit him, or maybe he blames it for his bad night. Totemic magic or something.

Ever since then, whenever he sees the gazelle he freaks out. But he's also obsessed with it. I can't just take it away, because he follows me and tries to find it. He wants to keep it in sight. Even the week we spent in San Diego didn't make him forget: Friday I accidentally left it somewhere he could see it, and when I tried to hide it in our closet he climbed on the bed and kept pointing at the closet and shrieking. Finally I had to take it out while he was watching, carry it to the front door, call him over, open both doors to the outside, and heave it into the front yard, locking the doors firmly behind it. Then I told Thomas it had gone away, and let him look out the window to (not) see it.

I brought it back in when he wasn't looking and took it to the basement to wash and store it. It accidentally got brought back up and Thomas found it again yesterday. We had to give it the same treatment. Beware the stuffed gazelle!