Fears

As Violet is getting older, she is unfortunately developing more fears and phobias.  She used to fine with dogs, but now she hates having them around.  If we go to friends' houses with dogs, they usually end up having to be locked outside or else Violet will cry the entire time.  It's really too bad, because Jack has finally gotten over his dog phobia.  But I'm hopeful that Violet will grow out of hers the way that both her brother and her mother did.  (Jack was actually much faster than me.)

She doesn't have quite the same fear of our cats, but she is definitely less tolerant of them than she used to be.  She'll push them off a chair or my lap if she wants to sit there.  And every now and then she'll get it into her head that she is afraid of one or both of them, and then she'll start yelling, "No Echo!" or "No Emmy!" until they run off.

The car wash experience continues to be a, well, gift isn't the right word, but it keeps on giving.  A distressing consequence of Violet's recent encounter is that she has developed a generalized fear of the dark.  It took a couple of nights of her waking up crying in the dark before we wised up and installed a night light in her room.

There is a part of me that thinks that Violet uses the word "scared" a little too freely to describe how she feels when she encounters things that she just doesn't like.  For example, Jack still likes to watch Thomas the Tank Engine on TV, even if he has mostly grown out of playing with the toy trains.  Violet hates it when Thomas is on TV.  I can't say I blame her.  That might be my least favorite of all the shows that the kids have ever watched.  But Violet will say that she "scared" of it, when there really isn't anything that scary in the shows.  The engines are frequently kind of nasty to each other and they get into a lot of accidents due to carelessness, so maybe that's what she finds "scary"?  Regardless, she actually refuses to be in the same room when Thomas is on.

I know these are all pretty developmentally normal, but I do hope that she grows out of them all.  I would hate for a fear of anything to ever hold my kids back in any way.