What do you do when your two year old has an irrational fear of snakes? To be fair, I guess it's not really that irrational to be afraid of snakes. It is frustrating when they're imaginary snakes though. It all began Sunday night, at 11:00pm, when Lilia woke up screaming hysterically about snakes (I didn't get her back to sleep until 2am, yikes!) and since then she's been having panic attacks throughout the day. We can be anywhere in the house and all of a sudden she'll startle and then begin crying and screaming about snakes. How much she hates them, how much they scare her, how sneaky they are, etc. Sometimes she'll be so convinced that there are snakes in the room she is in that she'll make me carry her into another room, fiercely clinging to me like a baby monkey and wailing in terror the entire way. This morning we had a tasty, if not entirely healthy, breakfast of waffles and Almond Rocca steamers while Elijah patiently waited for us to finish. Actually "patient" is not Elijah's middle name (it's Desmond) and he was pretty indignant the entire time. So indignant in fact, that I felt guilty for letting him cry the whole time and after breakfast I explained to the girls that it was now Elijah's turn to eat and they needed to be quiet, calm and nice to each other and not get into anything (HA!) while I nursed him. As soon as I had Elijah swaddled and happily feeding, Lilia let out a shriek of terror and we began a continuing cycle of me calming her, getting her settled, going back to finish feeding Elijah, Lilia waiting until he was almost asleep and them BAM!! she was climbing all over me, frightened beyond reason and screaming in my ears, and the cycle started again. We did this 5 times, but it felt more like 50. I ended up *Bad Mommy Alert* strapping her into her booster chair so she couldn't follow me, and giving her paper with markers to draw with and then I whisked Elijah away into his room and so that I could get him down for the nap that he desperately needed at this point. My hope was that the markers, which are normally forbidden--look at the walls in my house and you'll know why--, would distract her and she would be able to calm down and I would be able to get Elijah to sleep. The whole time Elijah and I were in his room, Lilia continuously screamed for me, without seeming to, or needing to, catch her breath. We have a white noise machine in Elijah's room to help drown out noise that the family makes, and it did a pretty good job this morning, but I could still hear Lilia, and with every "MOMMMMM!!!!!" I could feel my shoulders tensing until they practically touched my ears. I was eventually able to calm Lilia down by taking a bath with her until she announced that there were no snakes in the tub. (And thank goodness for that!) Carolyn alternates between exacerbating the situation by making snake sounds, and then insisting she was making innocent "s" sounds, to helping by coaxing Lilia to play with her, promising that there will be no snakes in their game. Any suggestions? I'm open to any and all :-) Also, I don't have a picture of snakes to use and snakes are really icky, so I decided to post an Easter picture of my kids instead. It was supposed to be down here, but I accidentally put it on the top of this post right under the words "When Imaginary Snakes Attack" and I can't delete it. Just so you know, I don't consider my children snakes, imaginary or otherwise.
