I Scared

Fiona's an airplane veteran with six round trip flights in less than two years. But our trip to Tampa over Thanksgiving was different from any previous vacation because for the first time Fiona was scared.

We keep her strapped into her car seat for takeoffs and landings, and we've never had a big problem in the past--usually we could talk to her or sing songs and she barely noticed anything out of the ordinary. But on our flight down to Tampa, she kept asking to be picked up during takeoff (which we couldn't do, obviously), and on the landing she got very scared, started crying, and wound up sucking on her thumb AND rubbing her belly for comfort while I repeatedly sang the Winnie-the-Pooh theme song to her and gave her a hug as best I could without undoing either of our seatbelts.

Any hopes we might have had that Fiona would be less frightened on our return after having made it through the first trip were dashed when she started crying as soon as we strapped her into her car seat.

Fiona also showed a greater fear of the dark than she had when we visited Tampa last June--we wound up having to keep a 25 watt light on all night long while we slept in an unfamiliar space (her normal nightlight at home is about 5-10 watts, I believe).

On the positive side, once each scary experience was over, Fiona didn't show any long-lingering effects. After we landed in Tampa on the flight down, she kept repeating the words "I scared" to describe what had happened on our descent. Mommy explained that it was okay to be scared sometimes, and that she had made it through the experience fine. After being assured that there was nothing wrong with her fears, Fiona then kept excitedly repeating to us "I scared" as we walked out of the airport, apparently pleased to be able to name the emotion.