Fear

Last October, I noticed that Tommy began to develop the emotion of fear. Before then, he couldn't care less about scary things. It was most apparent to me when we were shopping for Halloween decorations and a motion sensor skeleton started shaking and laughing as we walked past. He totally freaked out and even now mentions the skeleton whenever we go back to that same store.

Then he started having an occasional nightmare. The first one was after he watched The Incredibles around Christmastime. He awoke screaming frantically in the night and when I went in his room he said "They're coming to get me!" I said, "What's coming to get you?" but he wouldn't say exactly what, he just said, "I was on the stairs outside and they were coming!" I wondered if it was the robot from the movie we had watched that evening, but when I asked him again, he just said "The skeleton," which is his default description of anything scary.

But he seems to have developed a love-hate relationship with fear. He still watches the Incredibles and other movies all the time with no more nightmares, but asks to skip certain parts of the movies - like for example the scary toy part in Toy Story. The other thing he doesn't like is the very start of a movie where it says "THX Surround Sound" with the big bass music. He freaks out, running around, saying "SKIP IT! THAT SCARES ME!"

He also realized he gets more attention if he's scared, and when he doesn't want to go to bed he says, "I'm scared" even though I really think he's not scared at all but uses it as a stall tactic. Sometimes he'll say he's scared of something and when I say "Really? That doesn't seem scary," he'll just laugh.

Yesterday was my favorite thing he's been scared of: while in church and it was quiet as they passed the sacrament around, he said in a full, loud voice, "I'm scared of the sacrament!"