The interesting thing about toddlers is that as much as we try to understand them, sometimes we just really don’t know what the hell they’re thinking in that noggin of theirs. Like fears. I can hide behind the couch, jump out and roar, and Breanna will jump three feet in the air and collapse in a heap of laughter, thrilled to have been scared by her mom.

She’s developing some fears though, and they occasionally make sense. And they occasionally do not. She is scared of loud noises that don’t consist of me saying “BOO!” at the top of my lungs. I think the steam rollers started that and now every loud bus, truck, or car missing a good muffler freaks her out as she asks, “what THAT?!” Living on a fairly busy street, that’s a fun one. Still, I get that one. It has also morphed into a fear of the vacuum (she won’t cry but she will run out of the room as fast as she can and when I finish she peers around the corner asking, “all doned? All doned bacuum?”), the blender, and the electric mixer.

Downstairs, right in front of our front step there is a weird plant growing out of the crack in the cement. Hayley touched it one day and discovered it’s prickly and hurts. When Breanna went to touch it the next day, I said, “no don’t touch. Prickly! Hurt.” She took that one to heart and now freaks out whenever she sees it even though it’s perfectly easy to avoid it by going up the step on the opposite side. She’s also afraid of a cactus that we have inside even though she’s in no danger of accidentally touching it. She will now point at it and ask “what that?” in a trembling voice. When I say, “a prickly plant” she will jump back and say, “AHH!” very dramatically. It’s funny but sad at the same time.

She laughs at the ghosts in the haunted episode of the Backyardigans but she was afraid of the silk leaves I put out on the table with the Halloween decorations until I finally got her to touch them. Today, Hayley brought home a construction paper witch that she had assmebled which was about as tall as she is and I taped it in the hall. After an hour I had to move it into her room because Breanna refused to leave the room because she wouldn’t walk past it.

I try not to laugh because I know it’s serious to her but sometimes it’s hard.

Breanna loves pumpkins though. LOVES them. She screams with delight when she sees them and loves to hold the plush ones we have. We bought two pumpkins today for carving and she was ecstatic, hugging them and yelling about the “pumpkin patch”. So when we went to Zellers for a moment to get something for Hayley’s Halloween costume (I’m making an Orca costume for her, I’m going to be so happy and excited if it works out as well as it does in my head), and I saw a toddler-sized pumpkin costume, I grabbed it thinking, “what a perfect costume!”

You see where this is going yes?

She freaked right out when I came near her with it. I wanted to get her to try it on to make sure it fit and was loose enough for a warm coat underneath, but you would have thought I was trying to stick a hot poker through her skin. I managed to get it on her and she yelled, “OFF! ALL DONED! OFF!” but then she let me hold her for awhile. After she calmed down, I stood her on the bed so she could see herself in the mirror and she started laughing. She bounced a bit and when she saw how the pumpkin bounced around, she laughed harder. Eventually I took it off but then we put it back on to show George later and she was okay again.

I think it will be okay on Halloween night. Besides, she’s going to be pretty distracted by the activity around her. Granted, she may also be terrified by the activity around her, but at least her pumpkin costume will be the least of her worries.

And she sure looks cute in it!

Ah well. Just file this one with the rest of them under “never saw THAT one coming”.